it was a dream of a trip

SAFA Gallery, Shanghai, China

1 December 2017 to 30 March, 2018

Curated by: Shanghai Curators Lab

Imagine waking for the first time and, against all reason, everyone else waking too, sealed in their own rooms yet sharing the same astonishment. Recall the last morning that felt both surreal and undeniably bodily, when the world arrived as if newly made.

This exhibition inhabits that threshold. It traces the tremor of a body coming into being, a choreography of reckoning in which consciousness reloads through the thinking head and across the sensing body. There is a fugue-like interval when sight clouds, a dream mist softens the edges; then, with a squint, the veil thins and familiar forms surface amid the eccentric geometries of a daydream.

We attend to presence and absence, and to the traffic that moves between them. A constellation of works tests the borders of real and unreal, actual and virtual, past and present. The project is, at heart, an experiment in care: how might an impossible conversation yield a workable harmony? Twenty-one curators have collaborated on a single exhibition; what you encounter is our negotiated plural, contested, generous, and provisional.

We resist false clarity. Like the matter of dreams and nightmares, the exhibition admits many entrances and offers no single map. It recedes and returns in phantom waves. It gives back what you bring: attention, doubt, joy, argument, and makes of these a shared resource.

As the first Shanghai Curators Lab, we present an experience deliberately loose and unknotted, part inquiry, part feeling. We propose waking as a method, an active hope that binds analysis to sensation, critique to care. If it felt like a dream of a trip, it is because the journey remains unfinished. Here is our way-finding: not a conclusion, but a beginning that keeps beginning.

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