it was a dream of a trip

SAFA Gallery, Shanghai, China

December 1 - December 31, 2018

Curated by: Shanghai Curators Lab

Imagine waking up for the first time and against reason, the rest of the world holed up in their respective bedroom having the same experience. Perhaps, while at it, visualise and remember the last time you woke up to a surreal but also embodied feeling.

As an act of communal return to working together, this exhibition explores the intersection between the quakes and shivers of choreographing a scenario where the body is in the midst of reckoning and coming into being. A moment where the consciousness reloads through the cognitive head and across the feeling body. An instance of a fugue state where the eyes are enveloped with a foggy dream like mist. But as the eye squints the fog begins to lift, familiar shapes among daydream eccentricities begin to emerge.

This exhibition is about what is present and what is absent and the traffic and crossing of what moves in between. It brings together a variety of visual materials distinguishing real from unreal, actual from virtual, past from present. It is an experiment of love and care in the face of an impossible dialogue and an attempt at finding harmony in the dissonant voices of 21 curators asked to collaborate and work together on a single exhibition.

This exhibition consciously retains a resistance to clarity like the stuff of dreams and nightmares: it is a maze you can peer into any way you like. An exhibition that retreats and emerges in phantom waves, it gives back whatever you put in it. As a marker of the first Shanghai Curators Lab we present our loose and unknotted collective experience: it was a dream of a trip.

List of Artists

Aaajiao

Diego Ascencio

Ramiro Ávila

Richard Brautigan

Feng Chen

Zhang Ding

Display Distribute

Adelita Husni-Bey

Yan Jun

Chen Leng

Hanne Lippard