ILLUMInations – La Biennale di Venezia
2011-05-15 11:57

ILLUMInations – La Biennale di Venezia

Opening June 4 – November 27, 2011

Giardini and Arsenale

Venice

 

 

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce the participation of Birdhead in the upcoming 54^th Venice Art Biennale ILLUMInations.

Collatoral events include:

Zeng Fanzhi in The World Belongs to You at Palalazzo Grassi, opening June 2 – December 31, 2011.

Shi Yong in Glasstress 2011 at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, opening June 4 – November 27, 2011.

 

Birdhead is a photographic collective founded in 2004, consisting of Ji Weiyu (1980) and Song Tao (1979). Many, if not most, of their photographs are of themselves and their immediate surroundings. A strongly autobiographical strain or diary-like narrative runs through the work. There is an intensity and spontaneity that offers a glimpse into their world without any artifice. Every moment is shown as it is, with no convolution or adornment. The pictures (47x57 cm) presented in Venice – black-and-white and colour – are organized formally and presented in grids delineated by a poem in Chinese characters.

 

It is a visual diary of their friendship and of the city of Shanghai; a sum of interesting faces, expressions, and instances. Seen through their lens, they seem to become fully and inevitably themselves, with their personalities and physical appearance integrally linked. All of these elements are presented as casual snapshots, but that also has the snapshot’s uncanny ability to reveal anguish and loss. The photographs document the sum of instances that life is about. Birdhead embraces everything, despite affliction. The aesthetic is not a corrective to life, or life as someone wishes it were, but as complex as the thing itself. Their lives are their work and their work, their lives.

 

Ji Weiyu (1980) and Song Tao (1979) live and work in Shanghai. The artists graduated from the Shanghai Arts and Carafts School (2000). Recent exhibitions include Artist File 2011, National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (2011), China Power Station IV, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy (2010), Emporium, The National Museum of Technology ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, Milano, Italy (2009), China Now, Max Lang Gallery, NYC, (2009), China Power Station II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007), Birdhead 2006-2007 Photography Show, BizArt Art Center, Shanghai, China (2007), and Individual Position II, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai, China (2007).  

 

Further project of interest:

“Commercial Break” by Garage Moscow. Curated by Nevlle Wakefield, the project will be presented during the opening week of the Venice Biennale from 1 – 5 June 2011 and available to view on POST from June 1 through November 27, 2011. Artists invited by Arthub Asia to this program include, among others, Huang Kui and Hu Jieming.

 

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