Video Playlist: Infinite Loops

About The Event

Video Playlist is a recurring series of one-night public video screenings programmed in response to MoCP exhibitions. Nicky Ni curates a screening of moving image work exploring ritual and performance by artists from China and Southeast Asia. 

Infinite Loops is a selection of works, ranging from video, sound to live performance, by young Chinese artists who take a ritualistic attitude towards mundane activities that can almost be construed as what we call a “habit”. Finding the right word to communicate, waiting for the sun to set, tick tock, watching the sun setting, walking through the revolving door, playing ping pong, tick tock, flushing the toilet, anticipating lunch delivery, tick tock, waiting for a web page to load, tick tock…By dissecting these moments—negligible or barely memorable, rethinking the significance of them, and aestheticizing them through repetition or replication, the artists outline a kind of idiosyncratic beauty in enduring the tedious while inevitably hinting at the politics of class, labor and technology that are woven into the fabric of everyday practice. These works compose a collection of irreducible individual experimentations, with each a unique way of reworking routines.

 

The program includes an excerpt from the titular work by Double-Color Balls Group.

 

Participating artists in alphabetical order by last name:

Jiayi CHEN

Double-Color Balls Group (LIN Aojie + YU Yiyi)

Sunday LAI

LIANG Ban

Coffe LEE

Cherrie YU

ZHENG Yuan

 

Image Credit: Zheng Yuan, still from Dream Delivery, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

Curator Bio: 

Nicky Ni received her M.A. in Art History and Arts Administration from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2019, where she also received her B.A. in Art History. Additionally, she holds a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and French from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on all forms of time-based art with a specific concentration on computer-based art that involves real-time simulation. She is also interested in the reception of contemporary Chinese art in a global context. Ni is co-founder of LITHIUM, a Chicago-based gallery dedicated to time-based art. Additionally, she has worked at the Video Data Bank, Conversations at the Edge, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and was a Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Sullivan Galleries of SAIC.