Oliver Herring’s multi-disciplinary, globe-trotting, performative project Areas for Action makes its Shanghai debut at BANK with an on-going, open archive of new, tailor-made work in tandem with video and photo documentation of past events. Through an open call for volunteers in Shanghai Herring will create a situation for creativity in BANK’s Project Space that the volunteers will complete. Using elemental materials such as glitter, tape, body paint, tin foil, and willing participants this NYC-based artist pushes the notion of relational aesthetics towards the anarchic. Volunteers spurt colored liquids at each other, are painted in phosphorescent goop, or become the human core of improvisatory sculptures, turning the space into an artistic battleground where one’s vulnerability is overridden by one’s emancipation. Breaking down the boundaries between audience and author, process and object, Herring’s work often becomes a social experiment or laboratory where modes of representation are hijacked by modes of production. These unscripted investigations probe notions of human behavior, social psychology, and figuration in art with results that are explosive imagery. In conjunction with this exhibition Herring will present a lecture on his participatory practice at the Power Station of the Art on September 4th, 1-4pm. A very special thanks to: Josie Browne for initiating this project, and the Goethe-Institut and Power Station of Art for their support.
