Description

Catalogue of the exhibition Cao Fei. The future is not a dream , presented at Malba between November 29, 2024 and February 17, 2025.

With over twenty years of artistic production, Cao Fei (Guangzhou, 1978) is one of China's most renowned contemporary artists. Through diverse media, she investigates the social transformations of the 21st century brought about by the intensive use of technology and how these affect our subjectivities. This catalogue accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of her work presented in Latin America, produced by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. It features a selection of images from nine projects comprising nearly thirty works, most of them video installations, created from the early 2000s to the present.

In her curatorial essay, Pollyana Quintella situates Cao Fei's work within the context of contemporary China and explores the exhibition's main projects, organized into four thematic sections: " Past and Present of the Virtual World," "Manufacturing and Globalization," "Memories of Socialism and Sci-Fi," and "Dystopia and Urbanization." Meanwhile, Brazilian semiotician and researcher Marcela Vieira focuses on the utopian aspects of his projects, which emphasize the contradictions of the present. And in a text specially commissioned for this edition, Argentine art historian Lucía de Francesco, a specialist in Asian cultures, traces the instances of Chinese immigration to Argentina and the integration of this community into local society.

A synthesis of the hopes and tensions inherent in digital utopias, the book's dust jacket reproduces a banner from the installation Asia One (2018), which reads in Chinese characters: "Humans and machines work together to create miracles." In the words of Pollyanna Quintella: "When it comes to epistemic resistance, it is primarily artists who can help us liberate machines from the monoculture of productivity toward more polyphonic ecosystems. They steer us away from defeatist positions and, on the contrary, their commitment to the intertwining of reality and fiction is what makes us question any technical determinism."

Authors
María Amalia García
Pollyana Quintella
Lucia de Francesco
Marcela Vieira

Technical specifications
Published by: Malba
Year: 2024
Type: Exhibition catalog
Binding: Paperback
Dimensions: 24 x 17 cm
Weight: 525 gr
Language: Bilingual - Spanish / English
Pages: 202
ISBN: 978-631-90681-2-2