Minsheng Art Museum proudly presents KADIST: Pathways into a Collection, an exhibition comprising artworks from the Kadist collection. Pathways into a Collection displays gestures of individuality and autonomy in the context of meta-narratives and complex historical processes, being structured in three segments: Bifurcations of meaning, Work work work, and The aftermath.

Bifurcations of meaning
The pieces presented here confront the visitor with the possibility of multiple and mutable meanings of our surroundings, by exploring non-essentialist representations of the 'self', where individuals are always ready to be modified by unknown, external, or foreign factors (Fabryce Hybert, Daria Martin and Claire Fontaine); by tackling complex processes of identity along geopolitical fault-lines (Jennifer Allora&Guillermo Calzadilla, Julio Cesar Morales and Maayan Ruti&Amir Sela); while other works take such plurality of understandings through an interest on how the signifier and signified of a text or image never follow a single meaning (Matthew Buckingham, Martin Creed, Aurélien Froment, Lisa Oppenheim, Mungo Thomson, Mario Garcia Torres).

Work work work
Intertwining narratives of art, labor and social organization, this segment begins with a work commenting the absence of artistic autonomy in the philosophical tradition sparked by Rodchenko and his peers (Tim Lee); followed by works that recover photographic historical material related to the social conditions of post-depression America (William E. Jones) and pre-war Lebanon (Akram Zaatari); the representation of contemporary depoliticized youth amongst the architectural ruins of twentieth century progress (David Maljovic); and the immobility and petrification of the working class in parts of the world today (Damian Ortega, Sharon Lockhart and Marcelo Cidade).

The aftermath
In recent years, Kadist has acquired a significant number of works by artists from Eastern Europe, both by historical figures active in the last three decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall and by contemporary artists whose practices explore the aftermath of their former socialist reality. In this final segment, the viewer can find the documentation of a 1989 performance by Julius Koller and a film by Deimantas Narkevicus fictionalizing what was thought to be the future in Soviet Lithuania. These two works are followed by a video-installation by Carlos Amorales whose work does not emerge from the context described above, but whose fantasy world and its apocalyptic landscapes share a sense of an aftermath, of a day after the 'end of the world as it was once known'. 

Curated by Inti Guerrero 
Assistant Curator: Xiaoyu Weng (Kadist Art Foundation)