Jim Speers Long Days
Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC), Shanghai to 10 November 2012
Jim Speers’ exhibition Long Days is showing at Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC), Shanghai to 10 November 2012. Timed to coincide with the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Long Days featuresrecent video work by Speers including Night Barges, a new work filmed in Shanghai earlier this year. Speers looks at the Huangpu River and its surrounds, documenting the way they are being transformed by economic activity on the river and social forces at work in the urban landscape.
Speers says: “To observe things is to recognise the passing of time. I use video to explore economic activities in urban landscapes, attending to the particularity of things. I film landscapes being altered by social developments, making the viewer an observer of commonplace scenes passing into history. The sequences I create are ordinary today but will need explanation in the future. The videos present a mixture of objects, stories and historical facts. Everything is connected: flags and taxi trips are interwoven with people’s memories and plants growing.”
Long Days also includes videos exploring economic activities in urban landscapes in Minsk, Belarus (News from Nowhere,2012); Yugoslavia (Hotel Jugoslavia, 2012, made in collaboration with Mladen Bizumic); Detroit, USA (Ghosts of Detroit, 2012); and Tallin, Estonia (Raine Karp’s Linnehall, 2012).
Jim Speers’ recent exhibitions and screenings include: Hotel Jugoslavia, Museum of Contemporary Art, (MOCA) Belgrade, (2012); The Jetlag Show: China-Germany Multimedia Contemporary Art, Hannover, (2012); Envisaging Architecture, (screening), Museum of Applied and Fine Arts (MAK), Vienna, (2012); Globalization-Connections-Time ,Kunsthalle Faust, Hannover; 15th Tallinn Print Triennial: For Love Not Money, Tallinn, Estonia (2011); Numerology and Territories, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland (2010); Crystal Spirit, Starkwhite, Auckland (2009); Give us a Sign, City Gallery, Wellington (2009); Past, Present, Place, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2008).
Fei Contemporary Art Centre is a not-for-profit space run by artist/curator Li Xiaofei, one of the founders of the Zendai contemporary art museum.
Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.
Please contact the gallery for further information and images.