Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives

8 NOV – 23 DEC, 2018

CURATED BY JO YING PENG WITH THE PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: MADOKA FURUHASHI, HOU I-TING, HUANG PO-CHIH, VALENTINA JAGER, CHANTAL PEÑALOSA, YU CHENG-TA, MOTOS NINJA (NICOLAS POGGI, RICARDO R. ROJAS AND ANA G. ZAMBRANO)

THE WORKSHOP IS DEVELOPED BY LUCY PAWLAK IN COLLABORATION WITH KAREN CARRILLO, FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO AND RICARDO R. ROJAS

Coordination: Susana Solís

Press communication & translation: Elizabeth Calzado

Documentation: Ana Águila, Quetzal Emiliano, Bruno Ruíz

Space design: Adalberto Charvel

Graphic design: Estebán Géman

Book design: Lin Guan-Ming

THE EXHIBITION IS ORGANISED BY THE TAIWAN ACADEMY IN LOS ANGELES IN COLLABORATION WITH INSTITUTO ALUMNOS AND SUPPORTED BY THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE IN TAIWAN.

‘Is material more valuable than ideas?’ ‘Is society more important than culture?’ Narratives of Exchange places emphasis on elaborating our understanding of power by predicting its distribution within different networks. Focusing on how contemporariness reinvents its own language through exchange and how it illustrates the aesthetics of calculation, Exchange of Narratives depicts a broad landscape of economics in its fundamental definition. The artists’ works employ layered forms of value-in-exchange with a social-political criticality. In looking at how art is made, ideas of production emerge as a crucial theme. This sets up a context that juxtaposes the (un)measurable value, (im)material, labour, time, desire, power, language and sheds light on the tangible meaning of exchange.

El nadir, the piece of Madoka Furunashi, is made from stones from Magdalena Apasco and a group of clay figure fragments from San Agustin Yatareni. The stones are displayed at the halfway point in the production of flooring, with the cut marks standing as signs of the pause and postponement. The set figures are made by casting a clay mixture in the workwear of brickmakers during their breaks. Through these, the project tells of the materialization of the absent body that makes legible labour as a physical state and allows Furuhashi to index the often anonymous activity of industrial production in the natural formation of sedimentary minerals.

Assemblage of flawlessness by Hou I-Ting investigates the patterns of industrial labour by looking at factory assembly lines as a form of collective work as well as by performing the fictional model of atypical employment that refers to the parallel conditions of art production. Focusing on the history of female labour has been a crucial discourse for the artist, a context to portray a never-fading image of labour in a rapidly changing society. For Assemblage of flawlessness the artist collaborates with multiple workers to produce her work both on and off site. Through this it questions how much the body reveals under the influence of the political economy of the art system.

Five Hundred Lemon Trees by Huang Po-Chih began with the act of planting through which Huang created a space for both collective participation and personal realisation. A “subscription campaign” followed, allowing donors to become “collaborators.” As it has developed, the project has moved from incorporated donation, production and consumption into the observation and portrayal of how producer and artwork merge into a single entity. Five Hundred Lemon Trees includes the recent project Dream Inspired Millet Wine which is made by a neon installation with five Taiwanese aboriginal words. ‘gadaw' means to smell, ‘sequ' is sun, ‘sepi' is dream, ‘zarezar’ is light, and ‘kidjekec’ means to adhere. All of them were brought by Huang’s project encounter - a millet wine farmer-distiller to tell a producer’s nature narrative.

What is unseen proposes a scenic method to exhibit an abstract conception of movement, a sequence of images where objects and people are delineated by themselves, resulting in truth and exactitude, a return towards familiar surroundings. MOTOS NINJA built a choreographic dialogue in conversation with the expectation, with those things that could be but never are, with the absurd, with making possible-visible the impossible-invisible. What is unseen shows the error and the trial, it defines itself as it becomes, a scene that composes and decomposes as many times is needed. It is an experience that enters into the sphere of affection.

Making time explores the method in the production of time. As with Chantal Peñalosa’s ongoing work which investigates different work dynamics through the repetition of gestures that turn everyday activities into reflections on time, waiting and boredom, Making time aims to register the way in which objects move from one state to another. They become others without giving away what they are, they acquire another value and grow old before our eyes through a series of technical rudiments.

Tell Me What You Want by Yu Cheng-Ta is about the exchanges of gazes, desires, friendship, and wanting between a traveller and an exotic culture. In this project, the artist arranges four mockumentaries: “Malate”, “David”, “Joara”, and “The Shop”, which are intertwined and yet independent from one another. Each film symbolises products derived from various peoples, cultures and viewpoints. The title “Tell Me What You Want” is a local greeting referring to the transactional structure of street life. The artist incorporated such negotiations into the production of the film so that the different relationships and processes become tangled up in reality, social networks, and diverse desires found in Manila.

Valentina Jager’s work, Everyone pays, is based on the idea that all languages contain particular value systems. One inherent to themselves for which each word has a specific linguistic connotation inside its own structure, and another, subject to external desires: the political and economical considerations of speech and the linguistic capital value that favors certain dominant languages and discourages others. An exchange of language - translation - illustrates a negotiation, a selection/deselection of valuable words and a intangible meaning in between the languages.

Madoka Furuhashi experiments in temporary work discontinuance lie on a spectrum of sculptural, performative and symbolic demonstrations that intervene in existing chains of work and industrial cycles. Influenced by the method of archaeological and anthropological studies, her practice tests the physical result of partial suspension of work as a material source of knowledge. Through this she explores concepts of labour and the body, and how these entities are materialised in the system of contemporaneous production.

Hou I-Ting explores female labor conditions under social and economic systems. Through her practice, She expands the field of discussion of the body to address its agency in the social sphere and insinuates itself in historical narratives. Hou's works focus on transforming labor processes into the performance of a culture action to unveil their high degree of intensity, or to reveal a regulated body movement that skilled labourers such as embroiderers are engaged in.

Huang Po-Chih’s practice revolves around his family circumstances and history that have led him to issues of agriculture, manufacturing, production and consumption. Through text-based works and installations, he reassembles the fragmented historical and cultural contexts of his personal experiences. Daily consumer goods or events appear as “counterfeits”, with the aim of exploring how the “art (products or events)” can initiate new meanings and definitions within a social complex.

Valentina Jager’s practice unfolds in the borders between writing, sculpture making and performance. More than working around a fixed subject, her work explores the interests on perception of time and space, the ephemeral, and seeking an economy of materials and the use of imagination. In Jager’s research about, with, and around language she uses her own experience or else's words and actions as material and resource for the work.

Chantal Peñalosa’s research-based practice stems from small gestures and interventions in everyday life, which are meant to expound upon notions of labour, waiting and delay. Repetition is a crucial element in her process, functioning as an allusion to the absurdity, weathering, and alienating effects of work. For Peñalosa repeating actions evoke latent states in which dialogue appears unilateral and suspended in time.

Yu Cheng-Ta’s works mainly in video and moving image with performances that usually adapting a playful approach to language in his works. His practice deals with the interstitial gaps and humorous misunderstandings that arise when different languages and cultures collide. By focusing on the verbal and body language of the performers and interviewees, Yu investigates differences between culture, language and identity.

MOTOS NINJA

Creates from the outside and the inside with humor as a strategy of critique. The landscape’s transformation from the object and from the incidence of the body as an object, presentation and representation, the absurd. An attempt to demonstrate the mechanisms with which we communicate within contemporary art’s circle; to mock upon the readings, to modify them from the whimsical, to get rid of their speculative value, to strip away the ideas and transform them to generate wider readings but without losing sight of our own context. To approach irony as a device to generate critical thinking of the scene and life itself.

Nicolas Poggi is a researcher and an artist. He engages with several practices to fuse them into theatrical acts, dealing with them from humour and critique to transform scenic spaces and to create a personal language. His works have been exhibited in Argentina, Mexico and France. The relational practice is a research endeavour that Poggi develops with different artists.

Ricardo R. Rojas is a performer and a researcher on movement. His work deals with the virtuous body. To give virtue to a body, the body by virtue of something, an idea, a system. The body by virtue of memory, memory as a movement detonator. To expand this sense from an interdisciplinary practice.

Ana G. Zambrano is a choreographer, a performer and a teacher. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she projects a view engaged with the bodily and the choreographic. Her research is based on the discussion upon the concept of the ideal theatrical body, its limits and possibilities; the specific relation between bodies and the relation body/object. Faced with the necessity of finding a common language between choreography, dance, performance, and theatre, Zambrano carries out her work as a choreographer independently.

Jo Ying Peng is a Taiwanese curator currently based in Mexico City and runs Vernacular Institute. Working across curatorial and editorial boundaries, her practice addresses the agency of art by initiating alternative forms of production within performative settings and through experimental approaches. As former curator in Taipei Contemporary Art Center(TCAC), Peng has led projects that discuss post art history and institutional critique.

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