Four visual artists from Italy, Germany, Austria and China have been chosen to take part in the online art exhibition "Meme, Dialogue Among Cultures". Video is the medium explored in the show, and it is presented in a variety of different forms: as performance, as a video installation, etc. The specific content of the exhibition relates to politics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.
Assembled in this video compilation, the variety of output signals, with their symbolic elements, convey the tensions in the relationships between nature, and humans and underline the influence of the social environment on the individuals’ subjective consciousness via the visual information. This information source will allow us, at the same time, to dig deep into the past and to establish a space-time dialogue in the future. The dialogue is articulated through the artists’ use of visual strategies to investigate, question and witness the complexity and the paradoxes of communication in the current anthropological and social environment where art grows.
Rahman Hak-Hagir, Sall Lam Toro – GENE POOL (2019)
– "You can't fool the gene pool."
Video performance | 3 mins
During this process, there will be misunderstandings and translation errors due to social and cultural differences, individual and shared growth experience and inherent contradictions. We are trying to analyze the original intentions with the precision of a clock, but we also want to let them expand into a network of unrestricted possibilities, addressing the unknown from different cultural backgrounds. For the time being, the artists’ thoughts can be looked at as a sort of primordial soup of the spirit. Here often the differences between space and time disappear and there are no rejections. The fluxus of immediacy, accidents and spontaneity constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for subjectivity to appear, but, once this exists, it needs to converge through an irreversible transformative force and made present.
In recent years, many artists have travelled and lived in various geographical places, and cultures, one after another. What is today the purpose of the artist? Is it still to change the way of looking/seeing/viewing? Or is it to embed oneself in other cultures, being exposed to their local identity, and as a consequence, to expand our individual brain? Or is it just an individual quest?
Cristina Ohlmer - GLÜCKES SCHMIED（2015）
a performance reflecting the Asian paper burning offers for the dead
Performance Film｜6.03 mins
There are two things that we can leave to future generations after we die: genes and meme. Genes are physical, physical, and Meme is spiritual, chemical, and eternal. Meme is the genetic gene of culture, behaviour and habit. This universal form or expression as if it was codified in people’s blood and genes with each other in races, regions, and specific groups of people, Artists absorb a huge amount of fractal material in an endless flux of information concerning global society, bringing together different identities across local and transcultural contexts. This has a fundamental impact on how their perspectives are shaped and on how their works are presented.
The soil has changed and the context has changed. Are our ways of viewing, and re-thinking dialogue, content and artistic language changing and growing randomly? What has all of this become and how will it grow? The artist presents a seed and plants it in a field. What will grow into the audience' mind depends on the local context, on the thinking structure and on the cultural perception of the audience itself.
Alessandro Rolandi — Something about the living, the dead and the living-dead (2020)
Action Video｜5:20 mins
In this situation, we can witness two kinds of relationships established:1. When artists from different regions bring their own personal thinking and view into a region with different cultural structures, their collision with local artists, and the new environment, stimulate and new fields of exploration and challenges, opening up new possibilities of growth. 2. The shock wave produced by the interaction in an eccentric territory affects the expression and understanding in such a contradictory way, that the process of comprehension and communication between the artist and the audience might be deviated and subverted.
The selected artists speak through their own subjective artistic language and actions. Can they send out a wider resonant brainwave through the online exhibition? I have chosen to use ‘wave rating’ as a measure to detect our common original vibration at a genetic level beyond individual cultures, reaching out to the idea of humanity as a communal thinking organism. This is what directs and sustains my stance and values regarding artistic research, creativity and artworks. As proved by the endless initiatives, online and not, even in such a difficult time, the cooperation and exchanges among artists are among the very few, rare and effective group relationship dynamics that remain, resist and thrive. I have known, worked and exchanged with these artists for a long time, as colleagues and mostly as friends，During this period they are still maintaining the art system of their personal lives. looking for potential soil for planting their art meme trees.
Zhu Yu - UTC-5 (2019) 8mins
Beijing, Tibet, New York
Alessandro has been in China for almost 20 years. Cristina and Rahman their forefathers have lived in China. Cristina has also extensively travelled, worked and lived in China and she has developed a profound understanding of the culture and of the country. For this reason, please allow me to think that there is a part of Chinese factor in their body, in the same way as my in-depth research and study of European and Western culture have originated from me to feel deeply identify with the immortal civilization established by Jews. Jewish, Arab and Judeo-Christian cultures, the millenarian Judeo-Christian and Arab civilizations originated in the Mediterranean and middle eastern areas. At a specific moment, our restlessness, our continuous exploration of artistic boundaries and our curiosity towards the world to come has brought us together and gave us the opportunity to develop an in-depth lasting and meaningful dialogue.
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Writing: Zhu Yu
Translete: Alessandro Rolandi