SNAKE

 

兼容的盒子计划第一百零一期 bazaar compatible program #101
31°12.246'N 121°25.010'E
贪食蛇 Snake
乌尔琴与孙啟栋合作策划 curated by Carola Uehlken & Sun Qidong
2015/07/07 - 2015/09/27
安顺路98号小商品市场内26号铺 Shanghai, 98 Anshun Road, stall 26

In winter 2014 the curators Carola Uehlken and Sun Qidong first met in the curatorial team for the annual exhibition COSMOS at Minsheng 21st Century Museum of Art in Shanghai. Qidong was a member of the team right from the beginning and responsible for the invite of artists such as Harun Farocki and Harald Fernagu. When Carola was asked to experiment inside the Bazaar for the summer time, she remembered the great choices from Qidong and asked him to realize a curatorial game together, to get known to each others better and start a curatorial and artistical discourse.

The project started on July 5th and ended on September 27th, 2015.
The planned chain reaction ended end of august.
Later on they Carola Uehlken realized two more solo projects.

PROCESS
For the beginning we planned to do one exhibition every week, which could directly change up to one exhibition per day, per minute, per month etc to keep the time flexible. The first week was organized by Qidong, the second week by Carola and so on. What happened afterwards, belonged to the art as well as to the discussions and choices between the participants. The reactions must have had any reasonable connection to the shows before.

AIM
The artists as well as the curators were acting and reacting spontaneously, not knowing, where this journey would ever end, - The potential was lying in this working process: We could have lost control. We could have started needing control, but most important: We figured out, if we need control and to which point it is necessary, to act in arts. Reasonability is necessary to write applications to get support, but this office-lasting work is more and more disturbing the organical processes and experimental work for curators as well as for artists applying for one residency after another etc. Must there be such things like snakes, rules to follow? Where are the differences in theory and practise? What we found out during this process will end in a documentation and will be posted here soon too.

Spaces like the bazaar compatible program are rare in Shanghai. We were very happy to realize this project exactly in this space, and hope, we were not only raising questions for us, ourselves but for a bigger audience.

Carola Uehlken and Sun Qidong
Shanghai, july 17, 2015