Killing TV

For decades, television has been one of the most pervasive mass mediums globally, with live broadcasting central to how we consume information, news, and entertainment. At the same time, television has also heavily influenced art making, as artists experimented with various formats surrounding televisual culture.

Killing TV investigates how contemporary artists deploy, disrupt, and deconstruct television as medium and practice from the 1970s to the present day. Bringing together fifteen artists from across cultural and historical contexts, this group exhibition explores the interaction between contemporary art and television—in particular how artists have reflected on and challenged television’s pervasive power on culture as a whole.

With video works that take in performance art as well as sculptural installations—from parodying TV shows to appropriating TV commercials—the range of works in Killing TV invites audiences to embrace artistic experimentation and discover unfamiliar formats and settings. Together, the different artists explore issues of identity, consumerism, and human connection in society, thus probing the mass psychological and social impact of television from new perspectives. There is a thread of nostalgia that runs through Killing TV, yet the works of these artists encourage us to look, from acute and renewed perspectives in the present day, at the mass psychological and social impact of television, and how that fundamentally shaped the way we understand ourselves and the world.

Artists: Ant Farm, Dara Birnbaum, Chris Burden, Chow Chun Fai, Shigeko Kubota, Kwan Sheung Chi, Li Ran, Grace Ndiritu, Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut, Daniel Pflumm, Alex Prager, Aled Simons, Ryan Trecartin, Magdalen Wong

Curators: Jill Angel Chun and Tiffany Leung