Arthub Favorite: Week 125
Welcome to Birdhead World Again in Vienna
Duration: 2018 November 16 – December 9
Venue: Schiffamtsgasse 11, Vienna, Austria
Artist talk: 2018 November 15, 17:00-19:00,
Panelists: Davide Quadrio, Alexandra Grimmer, Birdhead
On the occasion of Birdhead’s new show in Vienna, Davide Quadrio and Alexandra Grimmer conducted an opening talk with the Shanghai-based artist collective, dressing on how they use photography as a media, how to develop new method in their art creation, and how they use their own art language to tell a global story.
Featuring multiple series of photographs and installations of all kinds, this exhibition reveals how the two members of Birdhead redefine the relationship between physical, invisible materials and images, and how they give shape to emotions and romanticism.
Breeze is an installation work composed of several pinwheels with photographs. Spinning in the wind and the warm light, images on the transparent blades and the pinwheels themselves constantly cast shadows on the wall like a slideshow, which get blurred in high winds, or, conversely, become clear when the wind blows slowly. The artists contrast the past moments documented through images with the present uncertainty in a lyrical way, and body the freedom and power of wind through the playful pinwheels.
In the still-life theatre Dreamed on display in the same space with Breeze, the ferocious-looking food of all colours, dolls in wild clothes as well as vivid scene-setting in the photographs all come from the real image of the two artists, or can be viewed as a metaphor for them. The dramatic lighting effects in still-life photographs echo the LEDs within frames which make the photos look like floating in the light. The glossy silks around photographs also add to the soft atmosphere.
From the photo matrixes combining different images to absurd still-life scenes, Birdhead reflects the instinctive reaction on raw materials, in response to the absurdity of real-world rules and looking on the vicissitude of human civilization. To trace human being’s plainness and romantic spirit is the primary drive for their creation.
About the Artist
Birdhead, consisting of Song Tao (b. 1979) and Ji Weiyu (b. 1980), has been working in the medium of analogue photography since it was established in 2004. The artistic practice of Birdhead is based on photographs but also beyond the philosophy of photography. Capturing all the beings around them, the two members of Birdhead digest and apply the thinking mode of conceptual art into the context of their image interpretation. By combining the photographic matrix, collage, installation, particular mounting technique and so on, Birdhead delivers a “Birdhead world” at different stages.
Birdhead has been internationally presented at: Living Cities, Tate Modern, London (2017); The 7th edition Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism | Architecture, Shen Zhen (2017); How to gather? Acting in a city in the heart of the island of Eurasia, The 6th Moscow Biennale, Moscow, Russia (2015); Birdhead were also nominated for the inaugural Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2013; New Photography 2012, MoMA, New York, U.S.A. (2012); Reactivation, The 9th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai(2012); Illuminations, The 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2011); The World of Other’s: A Contemporary Art Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2008); China Power Station II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Birdhead: New Village, EX3 Centro per l’arte Contemporanea Firenze, Florence, Italy (2011); Artist File 2011 The NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art, National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (2011). Birdhead’s works have been internationally collected by: Tate, MoMA New York, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Wemhoner Collection, The Margulies Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum and so on.