The exhibition Affect Machine: Self-Healing in the Post-Capitalist Era (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2021), focuses on the question “What is art communicating?” Facing the overproduction of art discourse at the academies, and debate about the role of online exhibition in the post-epidemic era, the curatorial team hopes to create a space for the audience to focus on their sensorial experience, and further explore how this perceptual path is related to affect theory in new art history. This panel contains two parts: we will address topics such as affect theory, machine-augmented sensorial experience, and affect of post-colonial creative practices, which will be conducted in the form of dialogue and screening of video clips.
Live stream (English): https://youtu.be/kHOYnFC0FTM
Session 1: Affect Machine: Sensory Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era
Yu-Chieh Li, Chen Chen Yu
Is there an art history that can be in dialogue with affect theory so that it can develop approaches that differ from conventional social history, style analysis, and image analysis? How are the practices of the seven groups of artists in Affect Machine connected to affect? In this talk, curator Yu-Chieh Li will provide an overview of discourses of affect theory applied to cultural studies and art history in recent years. Li will be in conversation with artist Chen Chen Yu regarding his trajectory, from essay films on the globalization of capital, to recent experiments of sculptures; how art can communicate experiences of self-healing in the post-epidemic era; how information is transferred among different media; and how our senses respond to the affect of machines.
Session 2: From Post-cinema to Post-coloniality: Affect in John Akomfrah’s Moving Images
Yu-Chieh Li, Chang-Min Yu, John Akomfrah.
In this panel, Yu-Chieh Li and Chang-Min Yu will draw from their research to discuss media, migration, and postcolonial archives in essay films and post-cinema. Akomfrah will join the talk from London, screening short clips of his works, and have a Q&A with the audience. We will discuss with Akomfrah his shift to three-channel installation, his views on migration, how he creates narratives about migrants that avoid reducing them to “others”, and how he employs camera work, landscape, and sound to create poetics for The Airport that respond to macrohistory and neoliberalism.
Speakers’ Biographies
Yu-Chieh Li is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. She has held research positions at UNSW Art and Design, Tate Research Centre: Asia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Li’s research engages with aesthetics of performance art in Asia and postcolonial discourses. Her publications appear in Third Text, World Art, Art in Translation, and the MoMA’s art platform “post: notes on art in a global context,” with an edited volume Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles recently published by Routledge (co-edited with Midori Yamamura).
Chen Chen Yu is a multimedia artist. His works look into the landscapes under the construction of digital industrialization and globalization of capital, and the inter-activities between human, commodity, and image. Working with moving images, objects, and installations, his practice often juxtaposes various media and examines how beliefs, desires, and anxieties are materially distributed in social production. His works on one hand depict the phenomena created by re/production, consumption, and extraction, and on the other hand explore the interpenetrative relationship and boundary between human, object, and environment. His works have been exhibited in Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei Digital Art Center, Asia Culture Center, Hong-gah Museum, Hong Kong Art Center, Ashkal Alwan Beruit, Kasseler Dokfest, among others.
Chang-Min Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. He received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa. His articles have appeared in Film Criticism, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and The Cine-Files. His current research interests lie in corporeal cinema, contemporary digital cinema, and Sinophone film historiography. Before returning to his alma mater, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis.
John Akomfrah (b. 1957) is a British artist and filmmaker whose works are characterised by investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality, and aesthetics, and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Akomfrah has gained acclaim for engaging with the most pressing global questions concerning us today — from the destruction of our fragile global environments, to post-colonialism and the spectres of those past histories; from memory as literal archive, to the temporal and spatial tropes of race in landscapes. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (2021); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, USA (2020); Barbican, London, UK (2017); and Tate Britain, London, UK (2013–14); among others. Akomfrah’s works are collected by major art galleries, including the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.