Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai and Para Site, Hong Kong are pleased to announce the opening of An Opera for Animals on June 22, 2019 at Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai. The exhibition runs through to 25 August 2019 and features 53 artists who challenge existing boundaries between art and other disciplines, including artisans, healers, teachers, researchers, filmmakers, choreographers, activists and poets.

An Opera for Animals takes the history of different versions of opera as a departure point to explore both contemporary and traditional uses of performance, fantasy, and group spectacles in relationship to the environments that they inhabit. Intimately connected to the making of myths, the fabrication of events, orchestration, and invention of new technologies, opera emerged seeking to synthesize different aesthetic forms into a unified experience audiences could immerse themselves within. Like the complex history of the museum or exhibition, it has gradually developed into another collective kind of ritual. At the height of its development in the West, opera increasingly became conjoined to the vision and forceful influence of colonization, and we re-contemplate the medium as a compromised interface that precipitated struggles with indigenous worlds and other knowledge systems.

Despite the fact that colonization has seemingly ended in many parts of the world, the struggle to preserve indigenous forms of heterogeneity still lives itself out into the contemporary age today. This other world outside of what is considered ‘high culture’ has always been a source of fear and intrigue for opera, it has long been an inseparable reservoir of imagination for the medium to replenish itself in spite of its outward ambition to reach and supplant it. Beyond the specter of phantoms in opera, animals and cultural narratives around animals reemerge in the exhibition as extensions to infiltrate and expand the specificity of opera as an institutionalized setting to consider the pattern of the relationship between our modernity and the natural world. Our interest lies in how the medium inadvertently mutated into an expanded stage for other more unpredictable transitions between notions of animality and our humanity. The exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum will unfold throughout the different levels to offer a different operatic environment to explore these interrelated themes.

The exhibition is part of a long-term collaboration between the two institutions and the institutional exchange will see another exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong in September 2020.

Rockbund Art Museum and Para Site are leading contemporary art institutions in Asia. Para Site plays a central role in nurturing artistic talent whilst also fostering cross-cultural dialogue and critical understanding of local and international issues in art and society. Sharing this vision, Rockbund Art Museum aims to bridge the local art ecology in Shanghai with Asia and the wider international community. The collaboration between Rockbund Art Museum and Para Site explores connections between performativity and research, considering both historical and contemporary practices, to further the remit of each organization.

上海外滩美术馆与香港Para Site艺术空间很荣幸地宣布，最新群展“百物曲”将于2019年6月22日在上海外滩美术馆正式开幕。本次展览呈现了53位挑战艺术与其他领域间明确边界的创作者，包括手艺人、治疗师、教师、研究者、电影制作人、舞蹈编导、活动家以及诗人。展览将持续至2019年8月25日。

“百物曲”以“歌剧”的不同形式与发展兴衰作为楔子，展开探讨表演和想象在不同时期及语境中的意义。作为一种艺术形式，歌剧尝试融合多种美学，不论神话的创造，事件的撰写，或乐曲的编排，新技术的发明，皆与其密不可分。如同博物馆和展览的发展经历了漫长而错综的历史，歌剧亦逐步发展成为另一种集体仪式。其通过控制每个细节和桥段来主导观众体验的形式，正如我们当代制度化社会的隐喻。展览以剧场表演为入口重新审视人类的行为，透过观察世界舞台上不同的文化和知识系统，讨论殖民时代早已消亡的当下，一幕幕保护文化异质性的抗争如何仍在上演。

“高雅文明”往往将不为其所熟知的地域文化视为令人恐惧的对立面。然而事实上，现代文明与各原始文化和价值系统始终互相渗透，彼此汲取灵感。展览所欲呈现的观点，在于检视与动物、自然等紧密相连的原始文化何以在现代性机构中再次显现，同时梳理相异文化与知识系统在互相渗透的过程中，如何产生变异以及想象新的可能性。展览自美术馆各楼层纵向延伸，带领观众在别样的“剧场环境”中对一系列相关主题展开探索。

本次展览是上海外滩美术馆与香港Para Site艺术空间之间长期合作项目的一部分，由两个机构共同策划和举办的下一档展览将于2020年9月在香港Para Site艺术空间开幕。

上海外滩美术馆与香港Para Site艺术空间均是亚洲领先的艺术机构。香港Para Site艺术空间的成立旨在培养艺术人才和推动跨文化交流，其对于亚洲以至全球化社会议题的探讨，具有深入并广泛的研究。同样地，上海外滩美术馆一直以来致力于策划大胆创新的项目，以多样的展览及公众活动不断促进本土文化与国际间的交流与对话。此次机构合作探索剧场表演与研究间的联系，关注从历史至当代的不同艺术形式与实践，在一个语境化和再语境化的过程中，突破机构既有的局限。