Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
It is often the norm that exhibitions take a great deal of time to conceive and to organize and very little time to be experienced. This is not the case with the Brave New Worlds, an exhibition that includes more than a dozen of videos and 16 mm and 35 mm films, or to be really precise, 3 hours and 33 minutes and 96 seconds of moving image. While imagining the show, my colleague and co-curator Doryun Chong and I sketched out the floor-plan of the pieces in relationship with one another formally and conceptually but also chronologically, taking into consideration their duration in relation to other pieces. We roughly estimated that it could take at least four hours for a visitor to see the entire show, maybe without reading labels. It might seem like a large amount of time to spend in the galleries but we imagined the exhibition as a journey of investigations, where the juxtaposition between time-based pieces along photographs, sculptures, drawings, and paintings allow for shifting levels of contemplation as one walks through each room.
During the preparation process we switched the location of several pieces all the way until the last minute until we were able to feel the fluidity between the narratives and their movement. Afterwards, Doryun mentioned to me that he understood the exhibition as a musical piece in three movements. I’ve come to see it as a chart of proximities, like the one drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of Jorge Macchi’s collage Liliput (2007), where individual works of art are interconnected with one another in a number of common areas in each of the galleries where they meet and share sightlines, floor and wall spaces, sound, light reflections or a cast shadows from their neighboring pieces. As its title suggests Brave New Worlds is not a swift stroll through one world but a journey through a constellation of worlds, viewpoints, and moving images that range from the open sea to a public park, from a narrow corridor to a deserted road, and from a floating satellite to mesmerizing skies. I recommend to leave your watch at home.
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