Our next TALK series guest this year is Shu Lea Cheang, artist and filmmaker, whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the boundaries imposed on society, geography, politics, and economic structures. From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio-hack in her current cycle of works. Her noted works include BRANDON (1998-1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by Guggenheim Museum, New York; 3x3x6 (2019), representing Taiwan at Venice Biennale 2019. Cheang is currently at work on UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema.
The talk: VARIANT V.0 focuses on 4 works from BRANDON to 3x3x6, from I.K.U. to UKI
“You and I don’t live in the same viral reality. We negotiate the state or self-imposed confinement, digital/corporal sexuality and sanitary surveillance on a daily basis. With no Post-Pandemic in sight, we are part of a [science] fiction playing out with bio-informatics, bio-engineering and mobile digital media. We have forsaken the protheses of cyborg-bodies and made kins with microbes. Catching up with variants B.1.617.2. B.2.2.7, B.1.371, P1, B.1.724, B.1.429, I return to VARIANT V.0 to recoup myself. This talk focuses on 4 works – BRANDON (1998-1999), 3x3x6 (2019), I.K.U. (2000), UKI (2023). As ever-mutating variants, these works are brewed years apart and threaded by my desire in gender hacking genre bending.”
TALK Series is a visitors program initiated by the Reykjavík Art Museum, the Icelandic Art Center and the Iceland University of the Arts.Since 2012, a selection of highly regarded international artists, curators and critics have participated. Guests include Heike Munder, Miwon Kwon, Claire Bishop, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Mary Jane Jacob and Dieter Daniels, Douglas Gordon and more.
The program brings the flourishing ideas and diverse practices within the international contemporary art scene to the Icelandic art community and the public at large. Each guests is asked to offer an insight into the field through a public lecture at the Reykjavík Art Museum, studio visits and a seminar lecture at the Department of Fine Art as well as an introduction to the Icelandic art scene through visits to practicing artists studios and the gallery and museum scene. The overall aim of the program is to support a stronger link between local aspects and broader perspectives of contemporary art. By joining the resources of three major local art institutions the wish is to convey current topics of art to both younger and established artists, art students and the general public alike.
The TALK series program is supported by the American Embassy in Iceland.
The talk will take place on the 28th of April at 20:00 at Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús. The talk will be in English – register here.
Free entrance
