Beyond Geography
Official opening: June 6, 2015, 2 – 6 pm
Duration: May 18, 2015 to June 30, 2015
Venue: BMW Brand Experience Center Shanghai 35 Xueye Road, World Expo Park, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China
Imagine you are in a car that speeds at an incredible velocity. You start your journey in the city, escape from the city, then rapidly you move into nature, discovering new places and adventures. Looking outside the window the landscape spins around you, creating a whirl of green patterns. The adventure begins and you are looking for the unexpected, the unseen, the limits you were never bound to. You do not accept challenges but you are looking for them.
In this exhibition, curated by Davide Quadrio, Regula Bochsler (Switzerland) and Li Ran (China) are creating a space where all the above elements are combined in a high technology, yet visually intriguing exhibition, that brings you travelling around the world in uncertain territories, unknown populations, that will rock your senses and bring you to a reality yet to be discovered. The Rendering Eye project and the series World’s End (2014) by Regula Bochsler, are the set that complements the work by Li Ran Beyond Geography. The two artists use images and references that come from very different sources, at the same time complementing each other creating a complex narrative of our contemporary existence and commenting in an original way on the concept of speed, identity, liberation and self-determination.
Li Ran
In Beyond Geography, created for the 7th Shenzhen sculpture Biennale (2012), Li Ran emerges in the guise of a parasite. He imitates the BBC Discovery travel series, playing the role of a host as he ‘documents’ an ostensibly adventure that takes place in a clearly fake 3D digital film studio with a blue screen. He leads the camera to discover and explore “exotic lands”.
In this occasion, we present for the first time in Shanghai the work Untitled – Song of the Lakebed, a poetic travel via images and soundscapes that capture moments of true life, without borders. The work starts with the sentence: “The moment is again and again/ Raise the head and look/ Or explore and silence.” It is a memento for all the travelers and for the human existence in general.
Regula Bochsler
Regula is a Swiss journalist, historian and documentary filmmaker. Over the years she has focused on an extensive and diverse range of subjects, including the Internet, the labor movement, advertising, media theory, U.S. influence on European culture and numerous other social, cultural and political topics.
An introduction by Regula Bochsler to her work
Shortly after the launch of Apple Maps in September 2012 a friend introduced me to this new map service and showed me around San Francisco. The Rendering Eye project began with this discovery. I have been working with pictures in different professional contexts, but I felt that I never before had seen similar effigies of the world. I got very excited about their visual characteristics and started out to explore this new digital “world” where cars and ships become ephemeral shadows, trees pupate into sculptures, containers melt, machines deform, and streets twist themselves out of shape. I randomly took screenshots of places I found remarkable, like a tourist who takes snapshots to remember certain places he has travelled to. The digital world of Apple Maps is divided into two very different areas. One is the place of fancy 3D renderings of mostly cities and their surroundings, based on aerial photographies taken from airplanes specifically for this purpose. The other place is based on two-dimensional satellite photography – mostly blurred, often covered by clouds or mist and sometimes even in black-and-white. With the Series World’s End (2014), I have explored the frontier where these worlds collide and documented the most intriguing locations.
BMW
BMW’s first ever Brand Experience Centre has officially opened in Shanghai. Covering an area of 2,000 square meters, the Brand Experience Centre presents BMW’s brand history, culture and technologies. Following the core principles of aesthetics, innovation and sustainability, the Brand Experience Centre provides visitors with a completely new brand experience. BMW warmly welcomes visitors to the Brand Experience Centre to experience the boundless inspiration behind the BMW brand.
