There is something magical about photography. In fact, its origins have gone through centuries of magical conspiracies; even including a legend of the Welsh magician Merlin in which a dark chamber could only have the effect of producing images if the opening was pierced by the horn of a unicorn. The camera obscura was known as the “magic camera.” To artists and scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the camera obscura produced "paintings of light." As early as the 1830s, William Fox Talbot called his calotypes "photogenic drawings" produced by a "pencil of nature", while Nicéphore Nièpce's heliographs were "drawings of the sun.” As far as photography is concerned, nearly 180 years have passed since Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype was patented in Paris and the spell has yet to disperse.
Despite the proliferation of images in the digital age, a condition that has inevitably contributed to the expanded presence of images in the world, even today photography maintains a sort of inescapable magical appeal. There are so many ways to produce images, so many ways to share and spread them, to manipulate and use them: maybe even attempting to preserve their magic. The world has become an increasingly visual place, as the production and dissemination of photographic images today is both instantaneous and dizzyingly prolific. Photography no longer refers to its technological evolutionary process. More than ever, photography has been integrated into reality lived in the same moment by cohabiting it, accompanying it, and sometimes even supplanting it.
The Free Fall
Many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness. We cannot assume any stable ground on which to base metaphysical claims or foundational political myths. At best, we are faced with temporary, contingent, and partial attempts at grounding. But if there is no stable ground available for our social lives, dreams and aspirations, the consequence must be a permanent, or at least intermittent, state of free fall for subjects and objects alike.
Our sense of spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically in recent years, prompted by new technologies of surveillance, tracking, and targeting. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, and satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a “God’s-eye view”. We seem to be in a state of transition towards several other visual paradigms. Linear perspective has been supplemented by other types of vision to the extent that we may have to conclude its status as the dominant visual paradigm is changing.
Paradoxically, while free falling, one will likely feel as if floating—or not even moving at all. As you fall, your sense of orientation starts to play additional tricks on you. Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.
If we accept the multiplication and delinearization of horizons and perspectives, new tools of vision may also serve to express, and even alter, contemporary conditions of disruption and disorientation. Falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place. Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backwards to an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling towards is no longer grounded, nor is it static. It promises a shifting construct with eyes on the stars.
Since ancient times, people have gazed up at myriad stars gleaming in the night sky, freely linking them to create constellations. The idea of “constellations” dates back thousands of years to the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Asia—all of which saw animals, human figures, and gods in the patterns created by the glittering stars. Different cultures in different localities gave their imaginations free rein to overlay the night sky with images from their myths, folk tales, and their interpretation of the world. This is a perceptive mechanism that developed to aide them in confronting the vastness and chaos of the world.
This biennial presents the perspectives of artists who take various invisible points scattered throughout the world and discover “connections” linking them, effectively creating new “constellations.” Using their keen perception, they discover the invisible connections that exist between public and private, the place where we are now and “somewhere else,” “now” and "then,” “self” and some apparently unrelated “other,” converting these relationships and meanings into photography, video, or installation.
Artists, curators, and scholars from different latitudes have joined together and we're all looking to the stars. Alongside the visitor, we will search for connections between seemingly unrelated and estranged works, as if looking up at the night sky, lured into searching for “constellations" that will offer linkages to something else.
The “constellation” concept is also essential to investigating new processes of action and research. It inspires new creative dialogue, allowing artists to find artistic ways of reconnecting past and future in order to rethink the present.
Finally, reorienting the perspective of our nature under the cosmic angles of the stars helps create connections between ancestral knowledge and data mining, fostering interconnected, dialogical artistic experiments. This liquid concept surfaces discussions of the ambivalence between two disparate realms: archaism and future. This idea of “constellations” conceptually requires working with other notions of time and re-signify the assumed linearity between past and future, i.e., concepts that deconstruct the idea of vertical time and history — from archaism pointing towards the future — and, rather, that take on a horizontal perspective.
Making the journey between the cities of Beijing and Beizhen, we also have the opportunity to experience the diversity of latitudes in the star-filled sky: it's reflective of interstellar travel through the interstices of word and image. This system will pose “questions” that spur the visitor to discover unseen connections in the world and allow them to engage in the creation of something new. Even after viewing this biennial, “unseen constellations” that have yet to be discovered will still remain. With this system, all constellations are possible: we believe we can create a space for resistance against the voracity of the contemporary image, opting rather for a space-time wherein the magic of instantaneous capture of reality is a meeting between experience, memory, and contemplation. What matters most is this journey: it's the amazing poetry of creating a route, a map, a voice directly aimed at humanity's subconscious.
Now, let's cross space and time with a breathtaking, celestial journey for the ages. We wish you a pleasant journey!
Ângela Ferreira
Artist & Curator
