ARCHIVE

An exhibition on display by Wendy TAI,

recipient of ADC's Emerging Artist Award

Concept:
Wun-ting Wendy TAI
Execution:
Joe Chunzu LIAO, Wun-ting Wendy TAI

To participate in the work:

www.xlieux.net

The limitations of installation art, in the sense that is described by Rosalind Krauss in Sculpture in an Expanded Field (1979), has become increasingly apparent with the evolution of how art is received and understood. Contemporary installation art has become so intimately interwoven into the institutional fabric of the art gallery/museum that it has lost its former transgressional streak. It is this challenge of reinjecting institutional confrontation into installations that is the primary motivation for this project. To do so would require a rethinking of what exactly contemporary installations should be...

Place vs. Non-place

The French anthropologist Marc Augé presents the concept of non-lieux as the antithesis of the anthropological notion of lieux, or ?place?. Briefly put, anthropological place signifies a space that is invested with meaning by its inhabitants who derive an identity and community from it; it has a history, it is ridden with rituals, there are relationships and interactions amongst individuals. A non-place would be what a place is not. Non-places are devoid of meaning, identity, or community; the space creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude1. They are spaces formed in relation to certain ends, to pass from one place to another. Neither place nor non-place exists independent of each other. Rather than an observable fact, it is a matter of perception, how you perceive the space - an airport, for example, has not the same status in the eyes of the passenger who passes through as in the eyes of those who work there everyday.

The Institution as a Non-Place: XLIEUX

The gallery is a place. We propose to turn it into a non-place through new media and social engagement. Therefore, the gallery itself is symbolically eliminated; shut off from viewers and turned into something that no one would go to, no point to arrive at.

However, how to turn it into a space in which there are still individuals passing through, and yet not identifying or relating with it? This is where the website comes into play as a platform for interaction. Through xlieux.net, people can interact with others, engage in conversation with them and see them by the use of webcams; it will be like everyday video conferencing. What is different, and what the viewers may or may not know, is that the image of their faces are fed to a projector in the gallery. Participants permeate the gallery walls, pass through them, turning the gallery into something like a computer router and hence a non-place, non-lieux, xlieux. In this manner we are questioning the gallery as a ?place?, an institution and an entity of authority.