Contextsundefined, and unfounded space escaping the grid of geography. at the same time, the
autonomous zone was able to shelter the experience of a total freedom of interpretation.
also Translocalmotion intended to examine the conditions of human life in dynamic
urban environments, including socio- economic conditions, the logics of mobility and
its subsequent cultural implications. Could these conditions, related to the current
form of human movement and urbanization and the cultural implications as reflected
by and from topical visual art, perhaps be described as a ‘migratory aesthetics’? an aes-
thetics which, contrary to the relational aesthetics of the 1990s, no longer concentrates
on the actual creation of social environments for intersubjective meetings, but rather
adopts the form of a ‘documentary aesthetics’ revealing all components related to mo-
bility such as arrival, change, combination, departure, deterritorialization, displace-
ment, encounter, interface, location, loss, memory, movement, passage, reconnection,
relocation, revisiting, separation, reterritorialization, and transformation. Yet, it is also
an aesthetics of mapping other phenomena connected with today’s culture of mobility,
such as the effect of newcomers on public space; an aesthetics stressing that indeed the
artistic reflection of the multifaceted culture of mobility gives way to a more fluid form
of perception, i.e. a plurality of sensory experiences that both transform and modify the
way we perceive the world.
To research these issues, the curatorial team decided to deploy the immediate
surroundings of the shanghai art museum as a starting point for their endeavours. The
people’s square actually functions as a microcosm of the complex dynamics affecting
the current issue of mobility. if you take a closer look at The people’s square, you will
find issues of migration and transition, traces of ultra- modernist urban planning and
manifestations of the power of the topical rhetoric of capitalism. in short, The people’s
square, as a microcosm, may hold great potential for artistic inquiries and artistic
research projects. Thus, the Seventh Shanghai Biennale treated The people’s square as
a location of knowledge transfer, connection, meeting, and exchange. it is exactly from
this perspective of knowledge transfer that the artists invited for the Seventh Shanghai
Biennale were commissioned.
For example, Tiong ang’s project Models for the People employed the historical
map of The people’s square, the 1930s map where the building of the shanghai art
museum still functions as the clubhouse for the equestrian sporting club. in those days,
the building was a specific location where entertainment created a clear awareness
of a collective identity. That form of constructed identity, as Tiong ang’s dialogic
exploration shows, seems to have been replaced in The people’s square by today’s
logic of mobility and the more fragmented experience of the collectivity a karaoke
bar creates. such experience is characterized by repetition and difference based on an
ongoing confrontation with various stereotypical systems of classification.
The installation DeriVeD by hito steyerl could be described as an artistic project of
re-mapping. The methodology of this work is formed by a psycho- graphical mapping
process of The people’s square as an unofficial but comprehensible film archive.
on the one hand, The people’s square has been the setting for many films made by
classic film directors such as antonioni; on the other hand, The people’s square has
a number of locations where immigrants sell bootleg copies of (these) films. That is a
micro- economic activity giving the square an additional connotation as a location for
distributing its own imaginary narratives. By mapping these hidden flows of desire and