THE DUST

Sounds of ritual instruments echo through a deserted landscape, while Buddhist chants wash over water-powered prayer wheels and the wrecks of industrial machinery. In The Dust, Tianzhuo Chen reveals a world in which computer-generated imagery and compelling video shots of nature interweave with absurd logics of chaos and creation. Inspired by the funeral ritual of the sky burial, where the deceased is left in the open air to decompose and be scavenged by vultures, the installation maps the passage from death to rebirth. Tianzhuo Chen weaves together Buddhist cosmology, corporate visual language, and nightlife hedonism to question the fragility and absurdity of contemporary life and its systems of belief.

The Dust is part of the exhibition series Dancing at the edge of the World curated by Petra Poelzl.

TIANZHUO CHENs artistic practice references performance, installation, video, photography, and painting and is infused with the iconographic vocabulary of divinities, ceremonies and rituals. His puzzling and immersive installations, surroundings and creatures question belief systems in the Post-Internet Era, mingling Buddhist cosmology and the visual language of corporate identities with the ecstasy of club nights. The artist creates experiential spaces that are equipped with creatures that seem to be in a constant state of transformation, a state of in-betweenness.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Dust (Dark Mofo, Hobart, Tasmenia, 2021 / transmediale Berlin 2022), The Shepherd (Kyoto Experiment, Kyoto, Japan, 2022), Trance (M Woods Museum, Peking, 2019), Ghost (Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, 2017), Ishvara (Long March Space, Beijing, 2016) and Tianzhuo Chen (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015). Recent theatre shows include Trance (Kampnagel Hamburg, Hamburg, 2022), An Atypical Brain Damage (steirischer herbst, Graz, 2018 and others) and Ishvara (Wiener Festwochen, Wien, 2017 and others). In 2023, Trance is going to be presented at Komische Oper Berlin.

DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Programm cycle Kunstpavillon & Neue Galerie Innsbruck 2021 & 2022
Curated by Petra Poelzl

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool;
it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The program at the Kunstpavillon and Neue Galerie Innsbruck 2021/22 is entitled Dancing at the Edge of the World, alluding to the eponymous essay collection by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this, the science-fiction author outlines alternative social and societal realms of possibility that are not anchored in a colonial, patriarchal, and xenophobic narrative structure. In a present shaped by a pandemic, virulent socio-political issues and the big question of how we live together seem to have fallen by the wayside. The nation state assumes the role of a crisis manager, while visions of a backward-looking future solidify and historical amnesia sweeps across broad sections of society. But surely, isn’t this very moment one with the inherent potential to accentuate speculative utopias and counter-narratives, to renegotiate ways of living together
and empathy in a local and global context? And to look for ways to integrate diversity on our planet into everyday considerations? How can our relationship with the environment be shaped responsibly? What ways of living together have proved/or could prove to be beneficial? And how can a conscious approach towards the past and its vivid heritage succeed?

The beginning was marked by two exhibitions: OPTIONS (Riccardo Giacconi, Kunstpavillon) and ARCHIVES OF RESISTANCE AND REPAIR (Shiraz Bayjoo, Maeve Brennan & Onyeka Igwe curated by Lexington Davis and Julia DeFabo Neue Galerie Innsbruck). The exhibition The Dust by Tianzhuo Chen can be seen in the Kunstpavillon during summer 2022. Other exhibitions from the cycle feature works by Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Hannelore Nenning and Elsa Salonen as well as a performance by Ursula Beiler.