Group Exhibition SNAP, Shanghai
This Spring and Summer, SNAP Art Center in Shanghai shows Annihilation, a group show of 20 artists from China, Brazil, Uruguay, the UK, and Germany. Through paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, photography, sound art, fashion design, AI technology, and performances, the exhibition brings about a proposal of ancestry as a technological system to which we should reach out to look for hints, signs, and codes on how to answer questions we've been all collectively making over the recent years: where do we go from here as humanity? Is it possible to imagine, envision and build a society that shares common intentions of self-preservation that includes the protection of our human heritage, be it cultural, historical, or environmental? Curated by Aimee Lin and Flavia Gimenes, Annihilation will be on display at SNAP Art Center until August 2023. A public program of live performances and talks with artists and curators is scheduled during the extent of the show.
Independent curators Aimee Lin and Flavia Gimenes have long been researching artists observing their familiar and cultural origins, ancient healing practices and astonished contemplation of nature from their immediate environment. In a time when dreams were seen as oracles that would predict potential outcomes for specific situations, it is believed that ancient people were guided in understanding the dynamics of the visible and the invisible realms, that is to say, the physical and the ethereal worlds.
But how would this be? What myths did the ancients create to make sense of the animal, vegetal, and mineral worlds and natural phenomena, such as day and night, rain and drought, summer and winter? How did they perceive the passage of time and correlate the stars in the sky and the planetary motion with the change of the seasons that later informed the creation of the agricultural calendars? How were daily events connected to natural phenomena, dreams to oracles, cave paintings to rites, myths to archetypes, and language to communication?
Annihilation seeks to provoke the audience to reflect on how our ancestors took care of the land and nature to leave us a rich legacy to bask in, one that we have been exploring to serve the aims of a contemporary consumerist lifestyle. With scientists saying we are at the brink of collapsing the planet, the show is an invitation to look back as a method to look forward. Seeing ancestry as a technology system means finding ways to reconnect to ancient wisdom to perpetuate practices of the traditional custodians of our land and potentially incorporate them to the new technologies that have been in development, which could help us to rethink our relation to each other (as society), our relation to nature, as and how we manage and make use of natural resources more efficiently and consciously, to be shared amongst all.
The exhibition is generously supported by School of Visual Arts and Bovis.
Press:
阿涅类寻与姆姆类仁 | 歧路批评
阿涅类寻 | ARTFORUM展评
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