Xuan Ye, Garrulous Guts, multimedia installation, detail, dimensions variable, 2019
November 14 - December 20, 2019, Extended until January 25, 2020
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 14, 6-8pm
Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present The Oral Logic, a solo exhibition by Xuan Ye. The exhibition was extended due to popoularity, and was featured as a Canadian Art "editor's pick" as well as in the Canadian Art article "Bending the Light" by Joy Xiang.
The exhibition is an assemblage of four multimedia installations that expand The Oral Logic thread out of Ye’s extensive research on the poetics and politics of human-machine coupling.
Turning the gaze inward on bodily systems, the installations are conceptualized using the cannibalistic metaphor of “eating and being eaten” to contemplate on our dialectic relationships with technology. We as bio-cultural-technological amalgams have always merged our mental activities with the operations of technologies in a broader sense. For example, writing is a technology we use to make sense of ourselves and the world as it reconfigures our consciousness. Having entered the electronic landscape, we, both consumer and feeder devour and chew, digest and absorb electronic culture in all domains. From eating to speaking, from the molecular to the epistemological, our body and psyche subject to the cyborgian economy where massive networks show affective and cognitive agencies and planetary computation is mobilized by the entangled power of political ideologies, economic imbalance, and cultural disparities. It is in such a context where The Oral Logic attempts to question “to what extent would this symbiosis evolve?”
The four installations interweave the The Oral Logic as if our minds already operate as silicon-carbon intelligence hybrids. At the centre of the space located pumping low-frequency sounds, which activate the sculptural diagrams on the wall and animated digestive system mapped with malleable texts. Machine learning algorithms are employed to produce text, sound and image during artist’s process of collaborating with digital bodies. The metaphor of cannibalism in Brazilian literature and translation theory offers ways to rethink cultural assimilation in colonial and post-colonial conditions. Borrowing the same idea to think about technological incorporation, Ye blends e-wastes with living organisms and proposes “vomit as a method” to redefine and reclaim human agencies in the hyper-control societies.
Xuan Ye (CN/CA) is the prototype of many objects. X makes media poetry that synthesizes language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time often through processes of diagrammatic and multimedial translations. X researches and works with non-human agency to transform complex systems and interconnected networks into aesthetic experiences.
X’s installations have been exhibited and featured internationally, including ELLEPHANT (CA), Vivid Projects (UK), Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM (GE), Trinity Square Video (CA), the Wrong Biennale (URL), Times Museum (CN), Galleri CC (SE), among others. X is a finalist of EQ Bank Digital Artists Award and a recipient of SSHRC scholarship. X’s live sound and body improvisation has been lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textural soma” by OBEY Convention. X has made appearances at Music Gallery (CA), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (US), Suoni Per Il Popolo (CA), OBEY Convention (CA), Kazoo! Fest (CA), Electric Eclectics Festival (CA), Downtown Music Gallery (US), Le Festival Croisements (CN), etc. X’s performances and releases have also received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!
For press and other inquiries, please contact Pari Nadimi Gallery at (416) 591-6464 or via email at info@parinadimigallery.com