OCCA is delighted to invite you to Wastelands, an exhibition at OVADA, Oxford.
Preview July 16th, 2015 from 6 to 9 pm
Venue: OVADA, 14A Osney Lane, Oxford, OX1 1NJ
Ai Weiwei, Ordos 100, 2008-2010, documentary film, courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing
Wastelands presents the works of eight artists who all have links to China. The exhibition explores the idea of waste as a result of consumption through different landscapes and materials ranging from ‘aesthetic debris’ in the work of Cai Yuan’s cardboard paintings installation to Cao Fei’s film Haze and Fog, a surreal and abject portrait of an excessively self-consuming Beijing in the form of a zombie movie. A participative installation takes the site of an out-of-town shabby hotel in Nanjing: Dream Hotel. By Nanjing-based HMFF Collective, it is a performative installation that critiques China’s ‘economic miracle’, drawing on possible everyday realities of ‘shady dealings’ and low level surveillance. In another work about a site, the ‘new’ town of Milton Keynes is taken by Sun Haili, who makes a living sculpture out of a section of grass from the edge of the site die to development. Anthony Key’s Dolly is a sharply observed sculpture made from a supermarket trolley in an absurd take on consumption and reproduction. Wessieling’s work takes the garment label and site of production in the vast clothes industry, creating placards and brands to question positions of power and invisibility in the circulation of fashion. Sun Yi, a young artist uses daily newspapers as material for drawings in ink, combining fine art vocabulary with free disposable material for everyday consumption of news. Finally, a documentary by the globally renowned Ai Weiwei, shows an ambitious architectural project in the new city of Ordos Inner Mongolia that engaged in an ‘out of the world’ location […] where boom and bust co-exist and where creativity takes elusive forms’.[1]
