Song Tao and Ji Weiyu founded the photography collective Birdhead in 2004 in Shanghai. The collective's oeuvre consists of videos and photographs of everyday life in their native city. The snapshot aesthetic of their extensive and accumulative photo-series, shot in black and white as well as color, deliver a subjective take on contemporary urban reality in China. The frenetic pace of change in Shanghai, which they lived through in the 1980s, is conveyed by the spontaneous and accumulative nature of their work, invoking the physical experience of being in Shanghai and the relationship between the body and the city. These acts of memorization come close to early conceptual and minimalist art approaches, involving an incremental and repetitious alteration from one piece of work to the next.

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