Everything Beautiful is Far Away
While artist and exhibition-maker Jean Bernard Koeman travelled the world to photograph its remoteness, Els Silvrants-Barclay studied Chinese, explored the ends and beginnings of the Silk Road and ended up living and working in Beijing. This makes them accomplices in the search for the ultimate far away forming the roots of this collaborative project.
Everything Beautiful is Far Away critically examines the wanderlust they share with many other writers, artists and researchers and looks into the different landscapes they come across and invade. As an artistic exercise, the role of the artist and the traveller are deliberately mixed up: not only the images produced, but also the mobility behind them, are object of curiosity.
Everything Beautiful is Far Away project:
http://www.everythingbeautifulisfaraway.org/
2008年的项目
2008 Projects
Instant Future
Els Silvrants-Barclay
"The transience of life and the passing of time are inevitable, thus the objective of both idealist and materialist alike should break into the present moment." (Hu Fang, writer, quotes the Book of Changes)
Instant Future draws upon two seemingly contradictory realities in China: an understanding of future that only finds its relevance in the present and is hardly granted existence in traditional Chinese thought, in a country where the biggest "futurist" project seems to be finding its form.
More specifically, Instant Future looks into the history and content of Chinese “science fiction” as an allegory of “future”, while actively producing contemporary science fictions with invited artists, writers and theorists. Simultaneously, Instant Future collects existing and creates new mediated images in which the Chinese future is used as the main narrative, while putting up a theoretical scenario on the power of the rendered image as an important capitalist and nationalist tool in China.
2012
2012 is a research project as a prelude to a performance that concerns itself with the space where conspiracy theories, propaganda, science, art and politics cross over with one another and become indistinguishable.
Intricately constructed and sharp as a scalpel, 2012 aims to be snapshot of uncertainty, of where desire, and fear, leads the contemporary imagination.
2012 project:
http://www.billaitchison.co.uk/billaitchison/2012explained.html
