Event
Frozen World of the Familiar StrangerPost an Event »
Kadist Art Foundation
October 12 - November 19, 2016Info
2401 Folsom Street San Francisco, CA 94110 Google Map »Reception
October 12, 2016 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Cao Fei, La Town (“Center Plaza” still from single-channel video), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and KADIST
Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger reflects upon the uncanny sensation of the ultra-modern global megalopolis, and the increasing sense of alienation we encounter in our flattening world. The exhibition builds upon social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1970s theory of "The Familiar Stranger” to consider urban apocalyptic symptoms; physical, environmental, behavioral, psychological, and especially social. At 7:30pm, London-based artist Himali Singh Soin delivers a performance in collaboration with local dancer, Lili Weckler. Entitled "Radar Level", the performance is set in the world's last geological minutes, in two ancient landscapes. One in the northern hemisphere in Mongolia at the site of the first dinosaur egg excavation and the other beneath the southern constellation of Nambia, on its old waters. The split projection reverses between desert and water. Dissolving in these images are found photographs of humans in spacesuits before the space age, gearing up for the end of life, for a distant voyage, for protection or for colonial imitation. Just as the title itself is a palindrome, here, the extinction of the past looks like the extinction of the future. The sound is a combination of dinosaur sounds and outer space vibrations, both anterior to human existence, yet only known through anthropocentric, technological re-imaginings.
