A cross-disciplinary project by MAP OFFICE [Gutierrez + Portefaix]
Tang Contemporary Art – Hong Kong cordially invites you to the opening reception on Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010, 6 pm onwards. There will be a special performance by Hong Kong-based Parkour group, Pipe Breakers. The trio will challenge the visitors with their acrobatic but unpredictable moves, fragmenting the duration of the visitors’ path into a series of multiple points of entry/exit.
Background
“…an urban neighbourhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighbourhoods have of it”
Guy Debord, 1958.
It is not everyday that one walks into an art exhibition and literally uses all of one’s intuitive senses to orientate oneself within a creation. MAP OFFICE’s newest project just about offers the viewer that experience.
Moving Sideways seeks to explore notions of displacement from the norm as an expression of territory, economy, social movement and play. The exhibition will look at ways in which a shift from established stereotypes can engage a new translation. It will expose the difficulty of moving from one point to another through the use of unplanned paths. Hence, the principle of motion is the initial impetus of the project.
In view of the current state of global communicative channels brimming with the sheer load of networking, the title of the exhibition points to the dynamic of negotiations and tendencies one faces within the reality of everyday life, and of the obstacles in finding one’s place.
The exhibition features artworks made specifically for the gallery. By taking into consideration the arrangement of, and connections between the compartmentalized spaces, the artists employ a variety of media, ranging from installation, video and drawings, to live actions involving animals and people. The sense of time-based experience embedded within the exhibition reflects the artists’ different strategies, attitudes and reactions to individual identity construction, the circumnavigation of individual paths and possibilities - to get to a point, a destination, a target or a connection.
With PARKOUR, the artists are bringing the street to the gallery, exploring performance as circulation. A highly-disciplined activity, it nonetheless assumes the wider issue of the free running state of motion within public spaces. As a critical tool to project new urban investigation, parkour also challenges our perception of the body, in how it should ‘function’ within the cultural and social norms of our capitalistic system.
Crabs also play a pivotal element in the other organic aspect of the exhibition. There will be an installation supporting a structure of aquariums inhabited by hundreds of flowery crabs; moving in reaction to the presence of random motion caused by the orientation/disorientation of the public manoeuvring against chrome bearing balls that fill up a large part of the gallery floor. More than just a rather playful game of calculated steps and patience, this artwork alludes to various conditional tensions and paradoxes that we face in our daily progress along the lines of fixed, existing environment and cultural relations.
There is also the presence of dancing crabs in a 12-min video work and a series of 9 drawings on Archival Art paper, which are abstracts of punctuated landscape made of different layers of graphic erosion, to the point of dizziness or ‘motion sickness’, as the drawings are titled.
Instead of following a strict pattern of formal coherence, MAP OFFICE organically appropriates and adapts different modes of performativity, animating the exhibition space and thus positioning viewers as ‘active’ spectator. What fundamentally defines and characterises their artworks is the unexpected juxtapositions visitors create for themselves and for the exhibition.
Curated by Josef Ng
