ECHO
An exhibition in collaboration with Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan (AVAT) and Britto Arts Trust
Supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Venue: Britto Space
Time: 5 – 18 March 2022
Curator: Shimul Saha
Curatorial note:
After a two years long break Britto Space is open to the public again with ECHO.
It’s a great experience to work with Association of Visual Arts in Taiwan (AVAT). ECHO is an outcome of a long relationship between Britto & AVAT. In 2018 Britto received an invitation from AVAT to participate at Taiwan Annual. Afterward in 2021 Britto joined the same program, but this time it was online based. During these experiences both of the organizations think and decide to do some collaborative activities and eventually they come up with an idea of an exhibition, where artists are from Taiwan and the exhibition venue is in Bangladesh (Britto Space). The Ministry of Culture, Taiwan has supported this initiative.
Artists CHIU Chih-Wei, SHYU Hsin and YANG Tzu-Yi’s creations have taken part in this show. If we focus on the presentation we can see an installation of CHIU Chih-Wei, where some backlit light boxes along with some transparent cube with plants. Then a website of SHYU Hsin based on Covid-19 experience and a three-channel video of YANG Tzu-Yi. Every artist picked a significant medium to explore their notion, but somehow all of them are talking about nature on their way. Suffocation is quite noticeable alongside the emptiness in each art piece. This suffocation and emptiness became the part of our nature, what we are experiencing again and again, like an ECHO.
Artists’ Statement:
UTOPIA
Plywood, Glass, Plants, Soil, Silk screen printing on tracing paper, LED lights
Artist: CHIU Chih-Wei
In the form of light boxes, cargo boxes, and specimen glass boxes, the vegetation symbolizing natural space is divided into different boxes according to different latitudes, in response to the scientific revolution and the scientific revolution since the 18th and 19th centuries. Technological progress has begun to set up natural history museums, science museums, botanical gardens, etc., to display so-called rare and rare animals and plants for people to admire. This kind of projection of human desire for utopia, peach blossoms, and wonderland, as well as the desire to control nature. And "UTOPIA Crates" in the form of light boxes, freight boxes, and specimen glass boxes creates containers that imagine "Utopia", and transports them and transplants them to the exhibition space, discussing the environmental control of human beings in modern science and technology imagine.
When the Virus Dies in Sealed Packages
Artist: SHYU Hsin
Since the beginning of lockdown, I wear facemask every time I go out. When wearing a mask, I feel isolated but perceptive more than ever. I started noticing texts from various locations which generate new meanings to me in this weird time. Some of them are left during pandemic, some of them are already there for years; some of them are preaching hope, some of them are shouting for doubt, inequality or injustice. I collected them because all the voices on the street is part of our reality. The way we live has been changed rapidly, but there are things that are always there, no matter good or bad.
These peculiar space-time experiences are sealed in packages I make for my used masks. The action of sealing is preservation but also isolation, just like our lives during lockdown. I believe there is no method to preserve our memory or feeling forever, even traces will vanish eventually. Nevertheless, by repackaging the masks, the uncertainty of whether they are carrying virus or not and all the consciousness I had while wearing them might be able to evolve into something else, perhaps a new interpretation of pandemic time in Edinburgh.
Survival Game
Video Duration: 8 min 56 sec
Artist: YANG Tzu-Yi
The location of the work is "Jianguo Nine Villages" in Taoyuan, which was formerly an Air Force family village and is now an abandoned empty city, but has since become a popular spot for survival games as players invade the area. The survival game (war simulation) movement and the environment of the village (a home away from the war) form a subtle relationship.
From the perspective of "survival game", "survival" is the core of the narrative, linking the past with the present, from the military families in the past, the residents of the village in the present, and the players of the survival game, and combining three groups of people with very different backgrounds to present an inter-temporal story - people are all in a survival game.