Alessandro Giannì: Multiple Unrealities

Blindspot Gallery</a> is pleased to present <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Alessandro-Gianni--Multiple-Unrealities/"/Artist/Chen-Wei/6CAB9E1A60D75414">Chen Wei</a>’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Breath of Silence”, on view from February 18 to April 5, 2025, presenting his recent body of works encompassing photography, LED light sculptures and video. Chen is known for his staged photography capturing cinematic scenes suspended in a fragmented time space, these scenes are meticulously constructed in his studio. Muted and often vacant, these charged compositions are allegorical of the psyche of contemporary milieu. His LED sculptures and video installations further transpose in three dimensionality the urban textures and motifs photographed on lens.</p><p><br></p>" />

Meldibekov (b. 1964), who has been making works that serve as metaphors for the ever shifting geopolitics of the region since the early 1990s. The Point Becomes a Circle, and Time Turns into a Ball in a Curved Space, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Rossi &amp; Rossi Hong Kong, will take place on the 8th of February 2025, showcasing a brand new body of works from the past five years. In them, Meldibekov returns to the visual foundations of his oeuvre, namely the point and the circle, as symbols to expound the art history and its contemporary discourse of the steppes in his native Kazakhstan.</p><p>For Meldibekov, a point, on the one hand, can be a geographical or topographical marking; it can also represent a location on a map or an event on the historical mapping of a place. In Karl Marx Peak and Friedrich Engels Peak (2024), for instance, the artist examines the changes in the toponym of several points on a map – the peaks of the Tien Shan, Alatau and Pamir mountains of Central Asia. Since the nineteenth century, these natural sites have undergone a series of renamings to adapt to the shifts in political power and ideology in the region, from nomadic societies, tsarist Russia and the former Soviet Union to today’s nation-states. The work consists of several aluminium basins and pots whose surfaces the artist hammered and drilled to resemble topographical maps. On them, he engraved points, lines and numbers with the names of the three peaks and their elevation marks. The result is a summary of all the past and existing names that these same mountain peaks have assumed, an imaginary chart on which time and space coalesce into a chimerical landscape.</p><p>The artist considers a circle, on the other hand, to be a flattened, crushed point, a metaphor for the cyclical nature of Central Asia’s historical events and the fate of their participants. This is well illustrated in Unmasking the Avant-Garde Artist (2024), where Meldibekov turns his attention to the unrealised Turkestan avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Also known as ‘the eastern wing of the Russian avant-garde’, the movement included a group of Russian artists who were significantly influenced by modernist art and ideas. For various reasons, they found themselves in cities such as Tashkent, Samarkand and Ashgabat in the 1910s and ’20s, often as instructors in art schools. Prominent amongst them was Alexander Volkov (1886–1957), who had a marked impact on the art scene in Uzbekistan. Volkov made his name with his radical geometric paintings inspired by Primitivism, Suprematism and Cubism. However, since the release of ‘On the restructuring of literary and artistic organisations’, a Soviet decree dictating the latest desirable trends and formats in arts and literature, he had been forced to roll back his artistic experiments and reformat his art in the style of Socialist Realism. Volkov’s transition to figurativeness took place gradually, from frame to frame, painting to painting. Meldibekov, in his signature maverick rebellion, decided to liberate Volkov’s paintings from their realist mimicry by applying a layer of white primer to selected areas of his own replicas of the artist’s works. In doing so, he obscures the figures in the late Volkov’s paintings and restores them to their modernist abstraction.</p><p>Fast-forward to the 1990s, when Kazakhstan first established its statehood following the fall of the former Soviet Union: a new, if not self-claimed, national hero emerged in the form of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country’s first president. From 2011 to 2018, a six-episode epic film based on his biography was produced to cast the politician in the light of The Chosen One for the newly independent country of Kazakhstan. Iconography from religious art and popular culture abounds in the film, which was executed in a style merging the old Soviet cinema of the 1960s with soap operas from the 1990s. It therefore elevated Nazarbayev almost into the pantheon of gods and deities on Mount Olympus. Meldibekov was amused. With his iconic sarcasm, he created an installation of movie posters titled Posthistory (2021–22). Playing with the words ‘poster’ and ‘history’ – ironically connecting them with the sociological concept of ‘post-history’ – the work is composed of ten posters borrowing from various frames of the film. In one example, the former president’s figure acquires monumentality, as he was literally lifted off the ground during his visit to the Kaaba in Mecca, recalling the theme of the Ascension in European art. Soon after the release of the film’s last episode, a large-scale uprising erupted in Kazakhstan with its main slogan, ‘Shal, ket!’ (‘Get out of here, Old Man!’). Indeed, out went the Old Man into his political heaven, for good.</p><p><br></p>" />

Bradford. In an exhibition that extends the artist’s recent formal and thematic investigations while pushing his practice towards distinctly new inventions, Bradford probes the enduring impact of colonialism and concepts of ‘otherness’ through the lens of individual experience.&nbsp;</p><p>Consisting of around 20 new paintings, ‘Exotica’ introduces a signature staining technique, wherein the artist uses caulk to create shadow-like imprints upon the canvas. These forms inject Bradford’s layered compositions with a trace of fantasy, strangeness, and memory. In its diversity of form and material – also encompassing works created with fabric dye, inked-paper, and oxidized paper – the exhibition reflects the continued evolution of Bradford’s play with figuration.&nbsp;</p><p>The exhibition’s title references a 1968 encyclopedia that catalogued exotic plants from a western perspective, for a western reader. The text took on special significance for Bradford in the way it reflects a colonial impulse to document and categorize the things perceived as ‘other,’ and the idea that naming something equates to understanding. Bradford took this catalogue as a starting point to consider how we create, imagine, and internalize such concepts of the ‘exotic,’ turning inward to examine his own preconceptions of what things are, and how those same preconceptions define his reality and experience.&nbsp;</p><p>Fifteen detail works take viewers into the woods – not any woods, but the woods of the artist’s imagination. As a black man growing up in an urban environment, Bradford attends to his own perceptions of the woods as something dangerous and foreign. These richly layered paintings extend Bradford’s treatment of the themes of migration and displacement, evoking the threats of a journey to, and through, the unknown.&nbsp;</p><p>The exhibition is anchored by five large-scale figurative works centered on the agave plant. A monocarpic variety, agave plants bloom only once, at the end of their lifecycle. Bradford was drawn to the idea that agave exposes its richness and full embodiment only once within its life, as a metaphor for peoples whose colonized conditions require them to conform and adapt to their circumstances, rather than to flourish.&nbsp;</p><p>Notably, this new body of works signals a significant shift in perspective, setting the viewer eye-to-eye with Bradford’s compositions and the fictions of the ‘exotic’ they contain.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p>" />