2026.01.16 Friday 19:00
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Artist：Duruo Wang
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In the folded mountainous of Southwest China, an opaque mode of existence — an affectable, relative “vacant zone”, sustained by topographic resistance to accessibility — functions, across iterated historical contexts and scenarios, as a condition of possibility through which the space and ways of living within it are continuously appropriated as a refuge in times of crisis. What’s Your Name? examines how representational production generated by crisis narratives, while converting this mode of existence into infrastructure, also inscribe it with an unpayable debt.
Moving back and forth between empirical memories (an active-passive representation) and historiographical records (interpretations of the conceived-lived), the project combines, and indeed confronts, various sources of official narratives, folklores, and engaged observations. By shuffling, scraping and shifting them, it cuts a ventilation duct for deferred memory within an experiential “vacuum zone” that has been enclosed, pumped, and sealed. Through a perplexed astigmatic lens full of confusion, it investigates the shapeshifting of a continuous imperial/modern frontier, unpacking and undoing the symbolic equivalences produced by uneven value production, which naturalize extraction and subsumption.
Duruo Wang is a writer and artist based in Chongqing and Guizhou. Their work is concerned with shared vulnerability and resistance within an under/trans-material condition of fugitivity. Grounded in embodied experience of topographic resistance in mountainous southwest China and in explorations the phantom form of linguistics in cultural production, their current research examines how a mode of existence otherwise, drawn from its iterative socio-historical contexts and scenarios, has been sequentially formulated as a relative void and thus manoeuvred by chronological frontier settlers into a space of refuge from politico-economic crises. Alongside this, their practice is also interested in facilitating a 'gossipy' study zone for collective unlearning, under the condition of friendship as a mode of (un/re)production that disenchants the mystery of self-determined and self-possessed knowledge and subjectivity.
Duruo completed an MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in 2019. From 2020 to 2021, they worked as an assistant researcher at the Institute of Network Society, China Academy of Art. Duruo’s other collective work includes the Con(tra)cave; the Eurasia Underground Library (and its branch, the Belly Button Conference); and the Drifting Collective (蹓搭, liu da).
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
