LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art
20 April–15 June 2014
OCT Contemporary Art
Terminal Shanghai
1016 North Suzhou Road
Shanghai 200085
www.ocatshanghai.com
www.maap.org.au
LANDSEASKY featured artists include Paul Bai, Lauren Brincat, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Campbell, Wang Gongxin, Shilpa Gupta, Zhu Jia, Yeondoo Jung, Derek Kreckler, Giovanni Ozzola, Joao Vasco Paiva, Wang Peng, Kimsooja, Craig Walsh, Sim Cheol-Woong, Heimo Zobernig, Yang Zhenzhong. Exhibition curator: Kim Machan
OCAT Shanghai and MAAP Media Art Asia Pacific present LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art, a group show presenting video artworks from 17 international contemporary artists to three countries in a major Australia-Asia tour. LANDSEASKY carries the hallmarks of MAAP’s unique approach to cross-cultural exchange. Artists from Australia, Asia and Europe are brought together in a conversation around a shared theme.
The exhibition opens across museums and galleries in China, Australia and Korea, and will open in OCAT-Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai on 20 April.
Jan Dibbets’ Perspective Corrections dating from 1968 transformed the way we think about photography as an art medium. His calculative and conceptual approach was also realized in film to articulate his particular aesthetic canon that is analytic, disciplined and reductive. As a starting point, these works use a very common understanding of landscape—a straight line across a page to signify the change of land to sky or sea to sky—and go on to transform this representation into an extended investigation of spatial effects and perspectives. It is from this premise, an investigation into commonality and simplicity of the horizon motif, that is the launch point of the LANDSEASKY exhibition. New artworks created for the exhibition will be in dialogue with some early 1970s video artworks by influential Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets. LANDSEASKY exhibits simultaneously for the first time, Dibbets’s “Horizon – Sea” (1971) series I, II and III, totaling seven projections that employ the camera to reframe the way we perceive the horizon by flattening and abstracting screen space.
Artists have made some stunning video works that use the horizon line in sublime ways. The limitation of the image to land, sea and sky restricts the visual elements to reveal the artists’ approach. The foundational curatorial concern looks toward the artists’ analysis of screen space as an image with both sculptural and conceptual attributes. The curatorial project challenges the illusionist elements that we readily consume in screen culture and sharpens our focus on the medium of video by the selection, inevitably comparing and contrasting the strategies each artist articulates within the restriction of the curatorial boundaries.
The exhibition brings to the foreground evidence of artists working with an analysis of screen space that demonstrates a variety of understandings of spatiality through the form of video art. In the wake of Post-modernism, by focusing on the notion of spatiality, this exhibition project aims to re-evaluate the relationship between the dichotomies such as virtual and actual, subject and object, abstract and real, and to a broader context, the modernity and postmodernity.
The exhibition LANDSEASKY in Shanghai is organized by OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific.
LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in art symposium is partnered with SIVA – Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, Fudan University.
Seoul partners: Artsonje Center, Gallery IHN, Lee Hwaik Gallery, ONE AND J Gallery, Opsis Art, Gallery Skape and in Brisbane Griffith University Art Gallery and MAAP SPACE. MAAP acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments; the Australian Government through the Australia Korea Foundation through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The exhibition is under the patronage of the Consul General of Italy in Shanghai; thanks to the Italian Institute of Culture Shanghai; and the Australian Embassy in Beijing, the Consul General of Australia in Shanghai.
