Event Details

Opening Thursday, October 15, 2020 with the gallery@calit2

5:00–7:00pm Artist Talk and Discussion with Jen Liu, Ricardo Dominguez, and Sumeyye Yar

An online exhibition in 3 parts

• Part 1: October 15
• Part 2: November 5
• Part 3: November 26

How to join:

• Live Stream
• Register for the Q&A

All gallery@calit2 events are public and free.

Description

In Gold Loop, 2020, gold, and its status as a liquid commodity, reveals some of the underlying matter of economic liquidity. Here, it is a material flow of nitric, hydrochloric, and cyanide acids as it is utilized in e-waste recovery, which dominates production zones, seeping into the soil, water, distributing itself in the skin, hair, and molecules of the workers—and passing on to following generations in the form of genetic mutations. However, dissolving - what is achieved by these acids—exists in parallel as an historical means of political resistance, collective disappearance when other methods of resistance are not possible. Dissolution—mass departure—is also an act of survival. The biopolitical loop closes—deeply unsettled, ghostly.

Bio

JEN LIU is a visual artist based in New York, working in video, choreographic performance, biomaterial, and painting to explore topics of national identity, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. Problem-solving methods are applied to complex social issues, then permitted to progress to their logical conclusions, create speculative narratives seemingly beyond reason—revealing elements of false consciousness and the limitations of existing solutions. Historical materialism across cultural types is embodied in everyday administrative and industry texts, while props, costumes, and animation take tropes to their ridiculous extreme. 

She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, and 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Art.  She has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Royal Academy and ICA in London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; as well as the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and UCCA Beijing.  She has received multiple grants and residencies, including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Sommerakademie, Bern, Switzerland; de ateliers, Amsterdam, NL; and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, among others.  In 2016 she was a resident artist at Para Site in Hong Kong and LMCC Process Space on Roosevelt Island, in 2018–19 she was a resident artist at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, and in 2019 she is a Swatch Artist in Residence in Shanghai.

She is currently full time film/video faculty at Bennington College, Vermont. 

Visit the gallery@calit2 website for past and upcoming events.