Performing Objects: Practices of the Everyday: Nadja Abt, Joan Jonas, Senga Nengudi, Olu Ogunnaike, Niclas Riepshoff, and Jasphy Zheng.

Hua International is pleased to announce "Performing Objects: Practices of the Everyday," a group show featuring object-oriented art, performance and dance from post-minimalism to the present. The show highlights historically influential artists such as Joan Jonas and Senga Nengudi alongside a new generation of international positions from Nadja Abt, Olu Ogunnaike, Jasphy Zheng, and Niclas Riepshoff. The exhibition is motivated by how the recent global changes have transformed our sense of the "art of the everyday" while establishing interconnections between distinctive art practices.

Coming out of post-minimalism and embracing both "art and objecthood" as well as the dematerialization of the art object, Joan Jonas (b. 1936) pushed the boundaries of sculpture into an expanded field beyond the horizon of landscape and architecture. Much of her early work consisted of artist films, such as in the single channel projection Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), in which Jonas's "electronic erotic seductress" uses mirrors and masks to create a space for reflection and ambiguity while interrogating gender character flaws. 

Similarly, Senga Nengudi (b.1943) combines malleable sculpture and improvised movements in Performance with Inside Outside (1977), whereby stretched and contorted nylon mesh tights capture rigid gender expectations in the language of anthropomorphic sculpture and avant-garde performance.

While Nengudi and Jonas expanded sculpture into situations attentively captured on film (Jonas) or photography (Nengudi), the much younger artists in this exhibition present performative actions both big and small that are more ambiguous and difficult to decode.

Hua International is pleased to announce "Performing Objects: Practices of the Everyday," a group show featuring object-oriented art, performance and dance from post-minimalism to the present. The show highlights historically influential artists such as Joan Jonas and Senga Nengudi alongside a new generation of international positions from Nadja Abt, Olu Ogunnaike, Jasphy Zheng, and Niclas Riepshoff. The exhibition is motivated by how the recent global changes have transformed our sense of the "art of the everyday" while establishing interconnections between distinctive art practices.

Coming out of post-minimalism and embracing both "art and objecthood" as well as the dematerialization of the art object, Joan Jonas (b. 1936) pushed the boundaries of sculpture into an expanded field beyond the horizon of landscape and architecture. Much of her early work consisted of artist films, such as in the single channel projection Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), in which Jonas's "electronic erotic seductress" uses mirrors and masks to create a space for reflection and ambiguity while interrogating gender character flaws.

Similarly, Senga Nengudi (b.1943) combines malleable sculpture and improvised movements in Performance with Inside Outside (1977), whereby stretched and contorted nylon mesh tights capture rigid gender expectations in the language of anthropomorphic sculpture and avant-garde performance.

While Nengudi and Jonas expanded sculpture into situations attentively captured on film (Jonas) or photography (Nengudi), the much younger artists in this exhibition present performative actions both big and small that are more ambiguous and difficult to decode.

The London-based artist Olu Ogunnaike (b. 1986) focuses on essential materials in his work, particularly the use of wood, which is central to his practice. He will present a new commission made exclusively for the exhibition in Beijing, 23:15_5Feb20. A five-panel charcoal printing on metal, which depicts the leftovers on a table after an event ended and people have left, the work – particularly the falling off of the charcoal with the lapse of time – intensifies the sense of transience, fragility and melancholy in everyday life.

Meanwhile, Chinese artist Jasphy Zheng  (b.1992)  raises awareness of the collective through evocative sculpture. In her new work, love letter No.5 (2021) she reenacts the failure of the process of communication, from a series of works of love letters started in 2015 in which the artist recreated by hand love letters that she asked anonymous people to send to her. The audience is encouraged to read the love letters, which require an extra effort to comprehend, juxtaposing familiarity and foreignness with voyeurism and vulnerability. By which it rewrites the power relationship between the transmission and reception of information, and challenges the power relationship between watching and being watched.

In a more direct approach to the exhibition, Nadja Abt (b.1984) choreographed a dance with her hand-made fan props. Fan Dance, which will be performed in Beijing for the third time (previously in Berlin and São Paulo), is based on research about the history of Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) and dance notations from Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban. The performers dance to each other and to the colors of the fans in predetermined "dance-color-episodes". The fans will be exhibited in the gallery and transform their subjectivity as the protagonists in "Performing Objects".

Concerns over subjectivity also feature in Niclas Riepshoff's work. The Berlin-based artist creates an allopatric environment where objects perform through their own forms. His The Third Hand (Finger I-V) (2021) deals with alienation by taking direct reference from the cult classic Spielberg film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). These newly commissioned fingers come out of two earlier "ET fingers" presented in Berlin in 2020. The fingers are made into large-scale paper maché lamps that create an intimate atmosphere that also points to a faraway cosmology.

"Performing Objects" raises questions about what happens in the intertwining of objects and bodies: What translates and communicates if we touch? What are the post-dramatic inversions, in which performers are used as objects, used by objects, and objects are used as performers? How can objects be performative in history, in epistemology, in art, conducting social and political implications and possibilities latent within?