PAST EXHIBITION ::::
Summertime; or, Close-ups on Places We've (Never) Been
Curated by Hou Hanru

Opening Reception: Friday, 26 June 2009, 5:30-7:30pm
Exhibition Dates: 27 June -12 September 2009

Participating Artists:
Knut Åsdam
Chen Shaoxiong
Jimmie Durham
Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Cyprien Gaillard
Marine Hugonnier
Emre Hüner
Aleksander Komarov
Mark Lewis
Sam Samore
Atelier Bow-Wow

Against the now-commonplace backdrop of an economic downward spiral whose sighted end keeps proving to be another mirage, summertime comes—a redundant predetermined mythology replete with its own cache of ready-made images. One such image, a stalwart in the Western canonical lexicon, is the spatial metaphor, only just drawn upon (“against the backdrop of”), “through” which abstract entities like summertime are positioned so as to offer relief for—a “vacation” from—other abstract entities like global economic repression. The promise built into the relief-inducing spatial metaphor is the very promise inherent in the relooping mythology of summertime itself—distance, perspective, the exchange of a messy recent past in which we remain multiply enmeshed for a balmy idyllic present brimming with nostalgic fantasies about what summertime (never) was.

Against the now-commonplace backdrop of...another mirage, Summertime; or, Close-ups on Places We've (Never) Been—an exhibition of film and video works by a roster of international artists, curated by director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Hou Hanru—comes to SFAI's Walter and McBean Galleries. Raising anew the question how certain forms of spatial organization—in particular, the utopic socioeconomic experiments of modernist architecture and design—have become so naturalized a force within the urban environment that they inform the very infrastructure of our identities, each of these artists foregrounds the social longing, the fractured intimacies, the circuitous displacements—in short, the anomie-engendered, within quite particular localities, by idealized and universalizing vocabularies for the configuration of site and space. Though generated out of the diverse cultural and personal backgrounds of their makers and though together demonstrating a manifold of filmic approaches and strategies, each video in its way proposes at once a critique of and a new vision for the hypermodernist sky-, land-, or cityscapes it provocatively evokes. In a word—indeed, in a coinage of Michel Foucault's—what these artists seek, albeit each in her own rigorously unstraightforward way, is that “other place” or “heterotopia” endlessly gone missing in the (sub)urban flux, endlessly driven out of plain sight into hiding by the totalizing and ratiocinative structurality of things, their exhaustive expropriation by the Enlightenment habitus.