Special Public Program: “Meshwork”

2022.12.27 Tuesday

“Meshwork” is a special public program throughout the course of “Multispecies Clouds,” consisting of forums, lectures, conversations, podcasts, screenings and book clubs.

“The metaphor of ‘meshwork’ refers to how individuals and knowledges are entanglements; they emerge through encounters with others – as ‘lines of becoming’, they are not pre-existent, self-contained and separate entities.”(Tim Ingold) As Ingold points out, this notion describes how we build connections through encounters and contacts, and thus form the intersecting courses of action in personal, intellectual, and interdisciplinary research activities. Like “Multispecies Clouds,” “Meshwork” as a metaphor is also a way of "storytelling," a way of unfolding the emergent, the fluid, the contingent, the historical, and the narrative “lines of becoming”. We will invite practitioners from various fields to participate in this “entanglement” and to work together to create new indeterminate networks. 

 

About the Project Curator: Yang Beichen

Dr. Yang Beichen is a researcher and a curator based in Beijing, China. He is the director of the MACA (Beijing), and one of the members of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada (Milan, Venice).Currently teaching at the Central Academy of Drama, his research examines the agency and potentialities of the moving image in the context of contemporary technology and ecology, deploys media archaeology as a radical framework to excavate alternative modernities, and ultimately aims to re-interpretate history and geopolitics from a New Materialist standpoint. His curatorial practices grow out of and attest to his multidisciplinary academic approaches. Notable curatorial projects include “New Metallurgists” (Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf), “Micro-Era” (Kulturforum, Berlin), the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021 "The Intermingling Flux" (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou), “A MOON WRAPPED IN BROWN PAPER” (Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai) , etc. Between 2019 and 2021, he also led a three-year research project focusing on the art of moving image in China at the NCAF, for which he curated three research-based exhibitions: “Anti-Projection: Media Sculptures in Early Chinese Video Art”, “Embodied Mirror: Performances in Chinese Video Art”, and “Polyphonic Strategies: The Moving Image and its Expanded Field”. He has also contributed critical essays for the catalogues of the artists such as Cao Fei, Laure Prouvost, Omer Fast and HO Tzu Nyen, etc. His academic monograph “Film as Archive” will be published soon.

MACA Art Center is a non-profit contemporary art institution housed in a standalone building of minimalistic industrial style and futuristic design in Beijing's 798 Art District, a major hub for arts and culture in the city. Through forward-looking and experimental content, MACA aims to enable communication traversing disciplinary boundaries while forging international dialogues grounded in the specificities of a Chinese perspective. Our programmatic scope, which spans exhibitions, research initiatives, pan-performance practices, and alternative communal engagement, signals a commitment to exploring ideas outside established epistemic frameworks. MACA seeks to position itself as a new institutional mode, proposing an alternative coordinate within the topology of Chinese contemporary art. Through art, we address our radically transforming times.