Shanghype (Prague)

Co-exhibitors:

Olivo Barbieri, Pierre Giner, Alexander Brandt, Melanie Jackson, Mattia Matteucci / Patrick Tuttofuoc,徐震(Xu Zhen),杨福东(Yang Fudong),张鼎(Zhang Ding),杨振中(Yang Zhenzhong),梁玥(Liang Yue),宋涛(Song Tao),黄奎(Huang Gui)

Shanghype! Shanghai, the city as celebrity

Shanghype constitutes a dialogue between remote cultures, conducted by means of video or broadcast over the Internet. The Shanghype exhibition offers a new perspective on Shanghai, a cosmopolitan port and Chinese city in itself filled with contradictions. Futura, in cooperation with BizArt, under the curatorial supervision of David Quadrio, presents and simultaneously co-authors a communication project, the basis of which consists of individual videos and Hipic Internet presentations. These two components together build bridges using contemporary language - the genesis of visual discussions between Prague and the remote, bustling city of Shanghai. The Shanghype exhibition attempts to be a sort of "new visual and mental silk trail", along which flow the clusters of information that depict contemporary Shanghai as a vivid mosaic of sound, images, lengthy shots and short video clips. The Shanghai installation in Futura is a visual probe into the life of a nervy and inspiring metropolis, which came about from the merging of two projects: it connects together individual video works from the original Shanghype project with the independent Hipic project.

The celebrity Shanghype

"In Shanghai the years fly by and every month alters the subsequent month. In the course of a few short years we have moved from technological prehistory to the digital age. LED screens and LCD monitors are everywhere - in taxicabs and skyscraper vestibules, in the Underground, across the entire facade of buildings or on massive screens carried out into the night by ferries on the Pujiang River… They are images on screens of such clarity that you cannot tear your eyes away from them. I am trying to put across the newest image of Shanghai with all its contradictions, because facts escape the eyes of the artist until such time as they become an invented, distorted reality, which nonetheless conceals extravagant details somewhere between poetry and drama and the reality that conceals the true face of Shanghai."
(Davide Quadrio, kurátor výstavy)

Shanghype allows us to watch Shanghai, a pulsating city, through the eyes of local artists such as Zhang Ding, Liang Yue and Song Tao. Yang Fudong's video - Robber-south, 2001, may constitute a commentary on life in the city; Melanie Jackson - Made in China is a woman's video animation looking back into history; Cohabitation of man and woman is the inspiration for the video The Next Second from Alexander Brandt, a German artist who is now permanently resident in Shanghai. Another visual commentary is the video clip Hero by David Cotterell. An older video, Shouting by Xu Zhen dating from 1998 monitors the reactions of the flowing crowd; a work by Yang Zhenzhong with the title Na Xiong Na Er can be perceived as a "portrait of the metropolis of Shanghai" - the video depicts a skyscraper as an active phallus. "Shanghai is becoming a city filled with phallic skyscrapers, in which architecture is nothing more than space torn from the sky." Shanghai may be an illogical mosaic, which is composed and decomposed in an avalanche of images without context, and the video clips Go Away by Huang Kui, the latest video by Pierre Giner or the video shot by the duo Mattia Matteucci and Patrick Tuttofuoco - The Green Sky - can be perceived. The list of names from the Shanghype video exhibition concludes with two works by Olivio Barbieri: A Silent Story and Riverscape 1 Night, China Shanghai 07.

In cooperation with:
BizArt, Arthub,

The year-round exhibition plan of FUTURA is supported by:
Ministerstvo kultury ČR, Magistrát hl.m. Prahy

Thanks to:
Imarmitaliani , C2C

Principal media partners:
Radio 1, Umělec

Media support:
Pragueout, Atelier

---

Share:
Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest