Sin Wai Kin: Dreaming the End

Fondazione Memmo is pleased to present Dreaming the End, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Sin Wai Kin (Toronto, Canada, 1991) from Wednesday, May 3 to Sunday, October 29, 2023. Central to the project is the new video work from which the exhibition takes its name, Dreaming the End, filmed entirely in Rome and produced by Fondazione Memmo.

The exhibition, curated by Alessio Antoniolli, is another chapter in Sin Wai Kin’s research that, through the practice of storytelling, reflects on the construction of the body and the culture that regulates it. Their work questions the processes that define gender identity and sustain a binary consciousness.

Constantly poised between reality and the dream dimension, Sin Wai Kin’s poetic approach crosses through categories and media: video, performance and installations are the languages used to give life to works that blend pop references and personal experiences, allowing an indefinable feeling to emerge, suspended between tenderness and melancholy, irony and drama, familiarity and alienation.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the video Dreaming the End (2023): a story that plays with times, references, space and places; making everything at once familiar and uncanny. Obsessions and contradictions are at the heart of the film, a journey midway between dreams and visions by a series of enigmatic characters interacting in different scenarios. References to different cinematic genres such as thriller, noir and fantasy, with forays into fashion and other areas of popular culture, contributes to the sense of disorientation conveyed by Dreaming the End, which continually questions and overturns the spectator’s assumptions and reference points. It is through this story - a pastiche of genres, styles, space and time, that the film asks: where does authenticity end and performance begins? Who decides this? For Sin Wai Kin, change is key to adopting a non-binary consciousness that dissolves the rigidity of certain patterns and allows our experiences to help us evolve.

The strong psychological connotation of the characters is underpinned by the locations that provide the backdrop for Dreaming the End. Entirely shot in Rome, the film is foregrounded by the grandeur of its settings, such as the gardens of Villa Medici, the interior of Palazzo Ruspoli and the spaces of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. These iconic sites amplify the sense of wonder intrinsic to Sin Wai Kin’s work, creating an unprecedented bridge between Rome’s rich history and the artist’s gaze. Together, they present an ever-changing landscape, constantly transforming and uniting past histories with potential futures, crossing different states and phases.

In addition to the film, the spaces of Fondazione Memmo will be populated by the characters of Dreaming the End at various stages of transformation. Busts and wigs will be placed in different spaces in dialogue with each other. They will be accompanied by a series of face wipes, revealing an imprint of the make-up used by the different characters played by Sin Wai Kin. These works act like “shrouds” that become paintings containing landscapes and cosmologies of a changing identity, witness to a never-ending process.

Biography of Sin Wai Kin
Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in performance, moving image, writing, and print. Drawing on the experience of existing between binary categories, their work realizes new worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.

The artist’s most recent film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, and included in the touring exhibition the British Art Show 9, as well as being screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include A Dream of Wholeness in Parts at Soft Opening, London (2022); It’s Always You at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); She’s Hopeful (2018) at Soft Opening, London (2020); Narrative Reflections on Looking at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2020); and Indifferent Idols at Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (2018). Recent group exhibitions include MYTH MAKERS — SPECTROSYNTHESIS III, Taikwun, Hong Kong (2022); Drawing Attention at The British Museum, London (2022); Interior Infinite at The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2021); Protozone at Shedhalle, Zürich (2021); B3 Biennial of Moving Image, Frankfurt (2021); Born in Flames: Feminist Futures at Bronx Museum, New York (2021); MORE, MORE, MORE at Tank Museum, Shanghai (2020); Age of You, curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Copeland & Hans Ulrich Obrist at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai & MOCA Toronto (2020 & 2019); Momenta Biennale de l’Image, Montreal (2019); Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder, curated by Jefferson Hack at 180 The Strand, London (2019); Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery, London (2019); BCE at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019). Their work is in the collections of British Museum Prints & Drawings; The White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

Biography of Alessio Antoniolli 
Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks, London, where he leads a programme of exhibitions, artists’ residencies, and participatory projects. He is also the Director of Triangle Network, a world-wide network of visual art organisations that work together to create artists’ exchanges and to share knowledge with each other. He has lectured widely and has been part of many juries including the UK’s Turner Prize in 2019. In 2022 he was appointed curator at Fondazione Memmo, where he will curate the annual programme of solo exhibitions. This is the first show Antoniolli curates in Italy.

Fondazione Memmo
Fondazione Memmo came into being in 1990 to realize the dream of its founder, Roberto Memmo. The Foundation has displayed masterpieces of every age and culture, with the objective of bringing a broad public closer to the world of art. Since 2012, thanks to the initiative of Fabiana Marenghi Vaselli Bond and Anna d’Amelio Carbone, the Fondazione Memmo has broadened its views with a new exhibition programme entirely free and dedicated to the contemporary art scene, promoting the interaction between the artists and the city of Rome. The program was started with the artist Sara VanDerBeek (2012), followed by Sterling Ruby (2013), Shannon Ebner (2014) and Camille Henrot (2016), all of them curated by Cloè Perrone; in 2017 the Fondazione hosted the solo exhibition of Giuseppe Gabellone curated by Francesco Stocchi, who was the curator also of the exhibitions by Kerstin Brätsch and the collective KAYA (2018), Latifa Echakhch (2019) and Oscar Murillo (2021). In 2015, Fondazione Memmo also launched a collective exhibition platform curated by Marcello Smarrelli, Conversation Piece, this year at its eighth edition. Since 2019 Fondazione Memmo is working in partnership with Gasworks, in London, to offer Italian artists a fully funded residency. The recipients of the first three editions are Diego Marcon (2020), Adelaide Cioni (2022) and Francis Offman (2023).