Sifang Art Museum presents The Infallible Interior, an expanded version of Notes for Tomorrow, featuring artworks selected by curators from around the world to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceived by Independent Curators International (ICI) and guest-curated by Su Wei, the exhibition includes many works shown for the first time in China and the addition of 11 Chinese artists, bringing together works from over 20 countries and regions. In this cultural moment of transition, each work is a source of inspiration from the recent past and a guiding perspective for the future.
The unprecedented circumstances of the past year have suddenly awakened us to the fact that everywhere in the world can be its own center, creating innumerable “interiors.” These countless new centers are shattering the worldwide hierarchies and their related discourse. They either revolutionize and mutate, or corrupt further. They can turn into impenetrable hard rocks that resist all challenges, on into single islands separated from one another. In today’s moment of re-division, long latent questions about interior and exterior have to be confronted again, with the hope that a new language can be created.
The exhibition The Infallible Interior is divided into three chapters: The Colossus in the Greenhouse, Nowhere Located and No Star Is Secondary to My Will. As a whole, they address the precarity in tackling the interior and exterior that are both conflicting with each other and rapidly evolving in contemporary culture. The exhibition asks, to what extent can the inwardness of a particular historical moment be shared, and in what sense do their imaginings of historical residues and future institutions form a common call? The Infallible Interior also attempts to create a dialogue between artistic practices within China and around the globe, providing ways to identify the multiplicity of China and the multifarious meanings it generates, and to confront the linguistic dilemmas that have persisted since the middle of the last century.
Many of the artworks in The Infallible Interior address spirituality as a grounding mechanism, sharing ways to make sense of the world when so much is in doubt. Some engage with specific mythology, while others reveal political structures that may or may not still be standing. The formation of monuments is questioned, and their removal is all but certain. The exhibition addresses art’s potential in the construction of collective memory in a global era. We learn the importance of sustaining and sharing different forms of knowledge, prompting us to re-imagine our conceptions of the future.
