LUCID ECHOES

PYLON is pleased to present the first edition of the exhibition series LUCID ECHOES, featuring a selection of international artists, in cooperation with HYBRID Biennale 2024 and Hellerau - European Center for the Arts.

For the first edition of the exhibition series, PYLON presents works by Shy Lea Cheang and Ayoung Kim at its temporal premises at Wilsdruffer Straße 16 - part of Dresdner Kreativ.Raum.Börse.

With 'Delivery Dancer's Sphere' by Ayoung Kim and 'UKI' by Shu Lea Cheang, PYLON presents two science-fiction video works, that both imagine a near dystopian future, which let their protagonists struggle with the impact of technology and data, body politics, labor and optimization in a hypercapitalist world.

Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is a 25-minute-long video work that investigates the semi-coerced movements of our contemporaries who are controlled by app algorithms via the collection of digital footprints: Ernst Mo (an anagram of ‘Monster’) is a female delivery rider who works for a platform called Delivery Dancer in the fictitious Seoul. In this fiction, Seoul is a labyrinth of endlessly regenerating routes, and the Dancers (workers of Delivery Dancer) pursue neverending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. This work is not only about the gig economy and platform labour, which have become immensely popular in South Korea especially during the pandemic, but also about the topological labyrinth, the possible world(s), the hypervigilance, and the accelerationist urge for optimization of body, time and space. It contains hints of a queer relationship with a counterpart from another possible world.

Ayoung Kim synthesizes the outcome of far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border control, the memory of stone and virtual memory, ancestral origins and imminent futures. These narratives take the forms of video, VR, sonic fiction, image, diagram and text, and are exposed as exhibitions, performances, theatrical projects and publications. Kim idiosyncratically synthesizes geopolitics, mythology, technology, and futuristic iconography, and retroactively collects the speculative time to infiltrate the present. Her interest in synthesis, hybridization, and the coexistence of heterogeneous time led to an interest in all kinds of intersections, transfers, transpositions, and interchanges of time, space, structure, and syntax.

Kim has presented exhibitions and projects at major institutions in Korea and around the world, including Oxbow Lake Time (Video Brasil, São Paulo, 2021, Online Solo Screening), Porosity Valley (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2018), Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Melbourne Festival, Melbourne, 2017), In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2016),The Railway Traveler’s Handbook (Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, 2014), PH Express (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2012), Minima Memoria (Street Level, Glasgow, 2010), and Ephemera (I-Myu Projects, London, 2009).

PYLON will also screen Shu Lea Cheang's feature-length-film UKI during the duration of the exhibition*:

UKI was conceived in 2009 and completed during the pandemic. Many themes appear to be responsive to current events, but are by no means new to Cheang's work. Living in New York in the 1980s and 90s, Cheang was deeply influenced by her experiences during the AIDS epidemic. While so many members of the queer community fell victim to the deadly virus, pharmaceutical companies and governments withheld life-saving drugs that those affected could not afford. Cheang's work has always focused on the lives and experiences of marginaliszed groups and their struggles against hostile or indifferent social systems, governments, and corporations. An early important work of net art is Brandon(1998–1999) It tells the true story of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska man who was brutally raped and murdered after his transgender identity was revealed. Later works use science fiction as a tool to establish queer and anti-colonial notions, and approach hacking as a framework to regain agency and autonomy.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker. Her genre-bending, gender-fluid practice challenges existing structures and the limits imposed on individuals by society, the environment, politics, and the economy. Her project BRANDON (1998–1999) established her as a pioneer of net art: it is the first online artwork commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Cheang’s feature-length films FRESH KILL (1994), IKU (2000), and FLUIDø (2017) collectively helped define a new genre of queer sci-fi cinema. In 2019, Cheang represented Taiwan at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, with her work 3x3x6. Since 2009, Cheang's practice has been set in a post-internet-collapse fictional BioNet world, exploring themes of viral love, bio-hacking, and queer and anti-colonial imaginations.

LUCID ECHOES

Shu Lea Cheang, Ayoung Kim

March 14 - March 29

PYLON-Lab x HYBRID Box Extended

Wilsdruffer Strasse 16

01067 Dresden

Opening Hours:

Thursday through Saturday | 16:00 - 19:00 h

*'UKI' by Shu Lea Cheang is screened at 16:00 and 17:30 h on open days.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen.

Gefördert durch die Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf der Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushaltes.