De(con)struction: Ruins in Reverse

Curated by Yuyue (Eunice) Chen

Artists:  Samuel Brzeski, Feng Li, Noa Yekutieli, Anna Zilahi/Laura Szári/Varsányi Szirének, Hai Zhang

April 13 – 27, 2023

The exhibition brings together a group of artists whose works employ evolving terrain as a means to deconstruct the process of modernization in the context of development and decay. Through photography, archive, performance, poetry, and video, the artists in this exhibition propose to reassemble the fragments and ruins from the developing landscape. The exhibition exposes the complexity of modernization in border-making, abandonment, displacement, technological construction, and ecological destruction.

Feng Li and Zhang Hai's extensive collections of photographs and notebooks, serving as historical archival materials, narrate individual experiences in their joint history and reflect the ever-evolving social and natural landscape in Chinese society along the Yangtze River from 1991 to 2022. Feng Li's collection of photographs documents the lives displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project from the lens of a documentary reporter; while Hai Zhang's project focuses on urban development, citizenship, and mobility from the perspective of an immigrant artist. Noa Yekutieli, an artist of Japanese and Israeli descent from the United States, deconstructs the apparent pattern in the ruins by reassembling the fractured photographs, paper-cutting, and wood panels. In the performance, the modernization of the village Tihany has disrupted its natural soundscape; in response, Anna Zilahi and Laura Szári transpose poetry and artistic legends into choral music, reenacting the community's collective rhythms in collaboration with the Varsányi Szirének choir. Samuel Brzeski works with the geolocation app what3words to rewrite a series of nineteenth-century romantic landscape poems into three-word phrases in juxtaposition with a new frame of the topographic satellite imagery.

De(con)struction: Ruins in Reverse not only presents how the actual environment and ecology of the homelands of displaced people have been transformed on a massive scale but also seeks artworks and witnesses from artists and others around the world.