Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière
Nowness Experiments: The Mesh
Nov 09 — Dec 13, 2019
K11 Foundation, Shanghai

curated by Alvin Li

“Nowness Experiments: The Mesh” is a collaboration between Nowness and K11 Art Foundation, and the second iteration of the titular series. The inaugural edition took place last year at Tank, featuring works and performance by Laure Prouvost and Ryoji Ikeda as well as a video exhibition curated by Davide Quadrio. Adopting the same format, this year’s edition, which takes its title from British philosopher Timothy Morton’s writing on ecological interdependence in the anthropocene era, will present two solo projects—by Bill Viola and Marshmallow Laser Feast—in addition to a moving-image installation exhibition curated by Alvin Li.

Echoing Viola’s and Marshmallow Laser Feast’s solo presentations, each innovative in its use of media technologies (game and interactive VR, respectively) to explore the human condition and our relation to media and our environs, Li’s section includes new and recent works in the expanded field of moving image-based art to reflect on contemporary conditions of precarity, interconnectedness and strange intimacies. While some of the works investigate the political economies of various industries that accelerate environmental change and social atomization, others speculate on notions such as queer ecology, new sensoria, imminent spirituality and co-existence in ruins.

A kind of expanded reflection on the material support of moving images, the co-constitutive relation between media and nature, and the role of artist as simultaneous maker and consumer of images and energy is another leitmotif that runs parallel to the thematic focus of this section, and which will be highlighted through the selection of works and exhibition design.