Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

After a three-year close collaboration with Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is now pleased to present Traveling in the Dark, an art project that brings together an exhibition, a series of events, and a publication. Located across the four floors of RAM, the exhibition features a selection of film, images, text, and music by the artist. Born in Vietnam in 1952, Minh-ha is an artist, writer, music composer, filmmaker, and literary theorist, teaching as Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco.

As a visual, sonic, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Dark intends to invite audiences to rethink reality differently from an approach based on “knowledge.” The play of visibility and invisibility—or what is seen, not seen and unseen—runs through the whole of Minh-ha’s work. In an open montage made up of resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages, this project undermines any pretense of a fixed identity, a historical truth, or a prescribed territory, and reflects on and questions the spaces opened up by the dark. Traveling in the Dark is also part of a major collaborative research project spanning 2019 to 2022 between RAM and a number of prestigious art institutions including NTU Center for Contemporary Art (Singapore), Wattis Institute (San Francisco), and Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart).

As Larys Frogier, curator of the project, puts it: Traveling in the Dark grants a particular importance to temporality, that is to say to this experience of a necessary time that one allows to oneself and with the other to stretch an image, to experience a question, to think a sensation, to make oneself available to desire in so far as it is made of so many moments of frustration, expectation, irritation, generosity and complicity. In this sense, Traveling in the Dark cannot be satisfied with a simple exhibition visit that would be based on the spectacular monstration of seductive images ready to be quickly consumed one after the other. This journey into undefined obscurities and temporalities requires from us a commitment in our own availability to dig in our buried memories, to (re)find (un)expected images or sounds, to raise questions that will never be followed by affirmative and definitive answers.

Throughout the project, RAM will organize a series of workshops, lectures, and dialogues in order to provide audiences with a more multi-faceted experience of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s world. In addition, a publication will be available to the public in 2023. Rather than an exhibition catalogue or an academic text, the publication Traveling in the Dark will be a fully-fledged artistic project expanded with writings, poems, and aphorisms by the artist alongside various interviews.

历经与艺术家郑明河长达三年的合作，上海外滩美术馆将于2022年11月12日至2023年2月5日带来郑明河艺术项目“暗游”，届时，项目将呈现展览、一系列公共活动和一本出版物。其中，展览将在美术馆的4层空间内呈现艺术家的多部重要影像、音乐以及文本资料。郑明河1952年生于越南，是一名艺术家，也是作家、作曲家、电影制作者、文学理论家，目前作为特邀教授任教于加州大学伯克利分校性别与女性研究系和修辞学系研究生院。“暗游”是一次视觉、声学、诗意和哲学并行的实践，邀请观众用不同于以既定“知识”为基础的方式来重新思考“现实”。

可见与隐蔽的互动，或者说看见的、未见的与看不见的元素贯穿了郑明河的创作。在由共振、回忆、交流、反思、语词等构建的蒙太奇中，郑明河的艺术项目打破了固定身份、历史真相或规定领域的伪装，反思并追问由“暗”所打开的空间。“暗游”亦是自2019年起针对郑明河创作的长期合作研究项目中的重要一站，由上海外滩美术馆与南洋理工大学当代艺术中心（新加坡）、瓦蒂斯学院（旧金山）、符腾堡艺术协会（斯图加特）等机构共同参与研究和策划。

正如策展人拉瑞斯•弗洛乔所说，“‘暗游’格外重视时间性，即为了延展形象，体认问题，思考感受，构建具有沮丧、期待、恼火、饱满和默契时刻的欲望，赋予自我和他者以必要时间的经验。在此意义上，‘暗游’不满足于以令人赞叹的方式展示富有诱惑力、逐个被快速消费的影像，做仅是被参观的展览。此次在黑暗和不确定的时间性中的旅行需要我们承诺做好准备，去挖掘我们被埋藏的记忆，（重新）找寻（不曾）期待的形象或声响，提出永远没有肯定与明确回答的问题。”

本次艺术项目期待观众投入时间，徜徉在郑明河的影像世界中，以开放的心态拥抱不同于常规展览的体验。同时，“暗游”展览期间，上海外滩美术馆将通过工作坊、讲座访谈等形式，为观众走进郑明河的影像世界提供更多的切口。此外，作为研究项目的一部分，出版物《暗游》将于2023年与公众见面。出版物不会以展览画册或学术书籍的形式发布，而将结合艺术家的作品、诗歌、格言以及一系列访谈，形成的一个完整的全新创作。