K11 Art Foundation

Performing Dramas is a collaboration between K11 Art Foundation and Centre Pompidou. This screening series, which made its first appearance at Centre Pompidou earlier this year, will be presented at chi K11 art museum in November. It includes seven visually, stylistically, and thematically distinct video works by a group of emerging and established Chinese and Singaporean artists, namely Fang Lu, Hao Jingban, Li Liao, Li Ran, Ma Qiusha, Tao Hui, and Ming Wong.

The series of video works explore the idea of the ‘performative’ in moving images. More specifically, it examines how dramatic scenarios, be they biographical, fictional, observational or real, have been widely employed by artists as a device and a theatrical means to imagine and reflect our increasingly complex histories and multiple realities.

This screening inhabits the model of a single screen, with all of the works being played on a two-hour cycle. This is a deliberate act in which the presence of the screen is dramatically elevated and amplified, but it is also our goal to imitate the spatial dynamic of a cinema setting in order to blur the boundary between screening and exhibition. The selected videos appropriate technical, visual and linguistic apparatuses from the cinematic realm. Mixing elements from the increasingly familiar presence of reality television and social media footage, the works show how moving images shift fluidly between differing dials of fiction, documentary, melodrama, comedy and tragedy. In the process, they reinterpret our perception of the world we live in today.

Opening reception:
08.11.2017