As social, geo-social and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, how does it impact on art practice and politics?
Curated by Utopia — a roving visual arts project for the Asia Pacific region — Intimate Publics is an exhibition of video works that delve into the revelatory world of intimacy within public spaces, probing the effect that the ever-present social media has on our public expression of emotion. Each Utopia collaborator proposes two single-channel video works for inclusion in a program of moving images.
What should I do to live in your life? What should I do to make our relationships work? Or how should we come across and fall apart?
These questions of empathy and connectivity inform Intimate Publics and the Utopia project.
Curated by Utopia @ Asialink in association with Fehily Contemporary and
Melbourne Festival.
Artists:
Nikhil Chopra (IND), Daniel Crooks (AUST), Larissa Hjorth (AUST), Masaru Iwai (JAP), Amar Kanwar (IND), Takashi Kuribayashi (JAP), Charles Lim (SIN), Minouk Lim (KOR), Tran Luong (VIET) and Jewyo Rhii (KOR).
Curatorium:
Yusaku Imamura (Tokyo Wonder Site), Sunjung Kim (Co-Artistic Director Gwangju Biennale 2012), Natalie King (Utopia @ Asialink), Deeksha Nath (curator/writer, New Delhi), Tan Boon Hui (Singapore Art Museum).
Date: 13th October – 5th November 2011
Venue: Fehily Contemporary
3a Glasshouse Road
Collingwood VIC 3066
Australia
An inclusive and itinerant platform for engagement, Utopia is a network of cities that converse and collaborate including Melbourne, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul and New Delhi.
After extensive regional consultation (New Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong…), Utopia has evolved to become an agile and peripatetic model that infiltrates existing activities such as biennales, art fairs and conferences. Utopia operates as an incubator for cross-cultural ideas, thinking and working methodologies.
This nomadic model of encounter is evolving and flexible, responsive and generative. Utopia aspires to stimulate a collaborative and consultative working method connecting diverse geo-political regions and communities. Given the proliferation of biennales, Utopia seeks to be an alternative model of encounter between communities, cities and geographies that is founded on collegiality and reciprocity. Utopia is a propositional and elastic structure that develops affinities with existing systems.