Curated by Belinda Kwan
 

…tourism imaginaries do not float around spontaneously and independently; rather, they “travel” in space and time through well-established conduits, leaving certain elements behind and picking up new ones along the way, and continuously returning to their points of origin. Such circulation always “takes time—historical time—and is not instantaneously achieved” (Urban, 2001, p. 105). Images, discourses, and ideas have certain points of origin—in tourism many of them are marked by distinctly Western genealogies—but are now incessantly moving in global “rounds,” not strictly circular, reaching new horizons and periodically feeding back to their places of departure.

—Noel B. Salazar, “Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach”

In filling the Klein bottle (y) {, Xuan Ye & Wenxin Zhang stretch and deform the applications of topology to explore the touristic imaginaries of n-dimensional navigation and digital, VR-, and AI-informed world-building.

Expanding her ongoing series, The Spectacles Before Us Were Indeed Sublime (2018–present), Ye leads us into a Penrosian VR cruise ship experience that asks visitors to consider how the all-inclusive travel experience functions as a phantom paradise of containment. A corresponding work, Every Body is Every Atom is Every Net is Every Wave (2019), crashes against the hull, amplifying the disorienting relationship between physical and virtual space-time. Onshore, Zhang’s The Vessel & the Drive series (2019–present) detours through divergent transmutations of path, terrain, and déjà vu. Propelled by a paratouristic momentum, the work takes its passengers through uncanny crusades and landscapes of varying magnitude.

Reconciling the technical with the conceptual, the speculative with the critical, the artists probe infrastructures of wanderlust and the homeomorphic transformations between colonialism and tourism.

This exhibition is part of filling the Klein bottle, a multisite exhibition series co-presented with Varley Art Gallery, Bunker 2 Contemporary Art Container, and Trinity Square Video.

For more on the exhibition series, visit www.fillingthekleinbottle.com.


Exhibition Dates
March 4 – September 26, 2020

Opening Reception
Wednesday, March 4, 7 – 9PM

Inter-object/subject/ivity: a few reflections on math, science, & their political aesthetic - Curator talk
Saturday, April 11, 2020, 12 – 1PM
Online using Zoom (link available upon registration)

Art as Critical Tourism: Sensory Time Warps & Acts of Worldbuilding - Artist panel
Xuan Ye and Wenxin Zhang, moderated by Belinda Kwan
Saturday, April 25, 10AM – 12PM
Online using Zoom (link vailable upon registration)

Read the exhibition broadsheet, including Belinda Kwan's curatorial essay "On the Shape of Time & Hauntologies of Trauma/Resistance/Transformation" here.


     

     

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Xuan Ye / 叶轩 (CN/CA) makes media poetry synthesizing language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time through diagrammatic processes and multi-medial translations. X’s work has been featured, exhibited and performed internationally, including Canadian Art, AGO (CA), Vivid Projects (UK), Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut, ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM, Trinity Square Video (CA), among others. X’s live performances and music releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!
 

Wenxin Zhang / 张文心 was born in 1989 in Anhui, China. She received her MFA degree at California College of the Arts in 2013. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented all over the world, in galleries including the Guangdong Museum of Art (CN), Artist Television Gallery (US), and Muffatwerk (DE). Using traditional and new media image-making techniques, her artistic processes are concerned with the experience of time and its progression from the mundane to the transcendent.
 

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Belinda Kwan / 关浩恩 is a Chinese-Settler curator interested in exhibitionary forms of critique, pedagogy, and advocacy. Her research-based practice focuses on North American techno/sub/urban infrastructures, and the global legacies of oppression that inform them. She has worked with/for local and international artists on projects presented by artist-run centres, public galleries, and non-profit organizations such as the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts (int’ l); Art Gallery of York University (Toronto); Myseum of Toronto; and Y+ contemporary (Toronto).