Kobby Adi: Cloisters & Instruments
May 1–August 25, 2024
Shuang Li: I’m Not
SI presents I’m Not, the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Shuang Li, featuring newly commissioned sculpture and video installations. Li’s work explores how language, relationships and identities are formed and mediated through screens and the internet. For I’m Not, Li delves into her own life as a fan to ruminate on how these technologies inform the social bonds and materiality of fandom, and the complexities of building a world predicated on a fervent love of something distant. Growing up in a small town in Southeast China, Li became (and remains) an ardent fan of My Chemical Romance, a band that introduced the possibility of subcultural belonging as well as the English language into the artist’s life. MCR fandom unfolds as a case study in the exhibition for an examination of distant bodies and displaced desires.
The ground floor at SI features a large-scale reimagining of an architectural model, akin to those Li would see as a child on weekend visits to real estate showrooms with her parents. Coming of age during the market economy reform of the 1990s and the rapid development of real estate concurrent with the urbanization of China in the 2000s, Li witnessed the growing and bursting of the country’s real estate bubble. The gleaming towers, seemingly erected overnight, promised a future that never arrived. Left half-built and deserted when the market crumbled, their skeletons stand here as abstracted visions of home.
Embedded in one building, Déjà Vu (2022) is a silent video, composed of documentation from a performance Li made during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was kept from entering her home country for three years due to travel restrictions, and footage from a GoPro camera worn by a duck in an animal rescue center in Geneva, where she relocated for two of those years. In subtitles, a short story describes a town where people started mixing up words, then forgetting grammar, and ultimately, lost the ability to speak. The featured performance, Lord of the Flies (2022), was a result of Li’s not being able to attend her own opening in Shanghai due to her displacement. Outfitted as Shuang Li clones with her signature My Chemical Romance t-shirt, bangs and platform loafers, 20 performers were locally trained to be her avatars.
For the newly commissioned video I’m Not (2024), Li rewrote the lyrics to the My Chemical Romance song “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” in Mandarin Chinese and English, which was then covered by an acapella group. In the resulting music video, a troupe dressed as an army choir conducted by a young girl melodically recites Li’s version of the emo anthem. Here, the artist, who taught herself English from MCR lyrics, gives shape and tribute to the formative years in which her teen angst was echoed in a language she did not yet speak by a band of four young men thousands of miles away.
On the second floor sits Heart is a Broken Record (2023), a heart-shaped fountain evocative of wishing wells in courtyards and public plazas. Found footage is projected from above into its rippling reflection. Interspersed with stock imagery of dripping blood and pumping veins is a montage of shots of crowds at My Chemical Romance concerts awaiting the performers.
Mapping a personal history across this memoryscape of wants and aspirations, language remains elusive and ever-shifting, as if, like an idol, it can never be truly known.
Shuang Li: I’m Not is organized by Swiss Institute in partnership with the Aspen Art Museum.
The exhibition is made possible through major support from Y.D.C., and additional support of Shane Akeroyd and the Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain, Genève. Thanks to Peres Projects and Antenna Space. This exhibition was developed during a residency at Callie’s in Berlin.
This exhibition is organized by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator at Swiss Institute, and Daniel Merritt, Director of Curatorial Affairs at Aspen Art Museum.
Kobby Adi: Cloisters & Instruments
SI is pleased to present Cloisters & Instruments, the first institutional solo exhibition in the US by London-based artist Kobby Adi. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of newly commissioned works in the expanded field of film and sculpture.
The exhibition is centered upon Adi’s latest film, Cloisters (2023/24). The silent 16mm film depicts apples in various states of decay, shot on film stocks that are themselves in multiple states of deterioration. Viewers can encounter the film across three sites in New York in different media formats: as a projection in SI’s lower-level gallery; as medical grade DVDs that can be borrowed from Tompkins Square Library and viewed at home; and, following the conclusion of the exhibition, as film prints that can be physically handled and loaned from the Reserve Film and Video Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Additionally shown in the gallery are documents confirming Adi’s gifting of the DVDs and film prints to the respective latter locations. Drawing on legacies of various experimental art movements, from structural film to conceptual art and institutional critique, Adi emphasizes the material conditions of filmic production as well as the entangled institutional networks that govern the terms of filmic reception, distribution, and storage.
Other works in the exhibition spatially articulate SI’s building in ways that unsettle the hegemonic grammars of the aforementioned art movements through performative allusions to West African animist metaphysics. Dispersed across all floors, All splashing and pouring (2024) is marked by uniform wall labels that detail the work’s title and specifications in SI’s institutional formatting, placed near locations where water does, or could potentially, spill. A ritualistic embodiment of libation ceremonies, where liquids such as palm wine are poured on the ground to invoke the more-than-human presence of ancestral spirits and deities, the work—as an indefinite score and devotional refrain—challenges and exceeds the presumably physical dimensions of the given architectural space. Two works both titled Instrument (2024) feature polymeters (devices containing both a thermometer and hygrometer) that have been altered to have their measuring scales removed. Left blank with active dials, the sculptures remain mystically suggestive as to what or who is being measured and detected.
Through aesthetic strategies that are by turns critical and poetic as well as materialist and spiritual, Adi’s works disrupt and expand the spatiotemporal conditions determining the relations between the artwork, the viewer, and the site of encounter.
This exhibition is organized by KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.
