Special Screening Project|Crab, Mushroom, and Whale: A Multispecies Cinema

2023.04.29 Saturday 14:00

Location

706 N. 1st St.798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd., Chaoyang, Beijing

Highlight: Ben Rivers

Featured Artists: Go–Eun Im, Fei Yining, Yi Xin Tong, Jes Fan, Li Xiaofei, Wu Chi–Yu, Zhang Wenzhi, Long Pan, Uriel Orlow, Liu Chuang, Patricia Domínguez

Guest Speakers: Ding Dawei, Li Zhen

As the exhibition "Multispecies Clouds" concluded its public display in the gallery space, we are embarking on an extended journey about multispecies under the framework of "Meshwork × Bare Screen". From April 29 to May 2, the second floor of Macalline Art Center will be transformed into a temporary movie theater during the special screening project "Crab, Mushroom, and Whale: A Multispecies Cinema". Experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers has been invited as a special guest to the screening, along with eleven artists to join this project. Guest speakers Ding Dawei and Lizhen will also join to give post-screening talks on the first two days. 

Building a cinematic world suffused with multispecies poetics, many of the works stem from the artists’ long-term researches, which generate discussions on the topic of multispecies in various forms. From whales, oysters, matsutake mushroom to sloths, and from the sea, forests, caves to cities, the species are the protagonists of these films, and video becomes the new vehicle for species narratives on a planetary scale. Through this screening project, we hope to delve deeper into the topics proposed in "Multispecies Clouds", and act as catalysts for fresh affects, imaginations and speculative thinking in this "cinema". 

The screening is curated by Yang Beichen, Director of Macalline Art Center, with generous support from Pro Helvetia Shanghai and LANHUI.

About Meshwork

“Meshwork” is a special public program throughout the course of “Multispecies Clouds,” consisting of forums, lectures, conversations, podcasts, screenings and book clubs.

“The metaphor of ‘meshwork’ refers to how individuals and knowledges are entanglements; they emerge through encounters with others – as ‘lines of becoming’, they are not pre-existent, self-contained and separate entities.”(Tim Ingold) As Ingold points out, this notion describes how we build connections through encounters and contacts, and thus form the intersecting courses of action in personal, intellectual, and interdisciplinary research activities. Like “Multispecies Clouds,” “Meshwork” as a metaphor is also a way of "storytelling," a way of unfolding the emergent, the fluid, the contingent, the historical, and the narrative “lines of becoming”. We will invite practitioners from various fields to participate in this “entanglement” and to work together to create new indeterminate networks.

About Bare Screen

As a long–term video project, “Bare Screen” is not a theme or concept; it envisions circulation and exchange among isolated bodies that collectively participate in understanding and constructing the frontiers of change in the world. “Bare Screen” is progressive, discursive, and non-panoramic. By assembling fragmented phenomena and connecting complex subjects, the project creates an organic chain reaction, and seeks to infiltrate into a deeper level of our culture and collective consciousness today among all of the joyful and uncomfortable experiences that arise from this constantly-changing media environment.

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.