Horizons: Is there anybody out there?

2023.09.16 – 2023.10.25
Curator: Robin Peckham
Participating Artists: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Dora Budor, Hilo Chen, Xinyi Cheng, Cui Jie, Simon Denny, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Buck Ellison, Carolyn Forrester, Owen Fu, Sayre Gomez, Guan Xiao, Han Bing, Tishan Hsu , Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Allison Katz, KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Josh Kline, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Heidi Lau, Li Ming, Yong Xiang Li, Liu Chuang, Jr-Shin Luo, Nancy Lupo, Mai Zhixiong, Helen Marten, Alexandra Noel, Peng Zuqiang, Tara Walters, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Xie Nanxing, Joseph Yaeger, Yu Honglei, Yu Peng, Zhao Gang, Zhou Siwei (alphabetically)

Antenna Space is pleased to announce the 10th anniversary group exhibition “Horizons: Is there anybody out there?” curated by Robin Peckham, from 16 September to 25 October, 2023.

For a decade now, Antenna Space has been true to its namesake as a node in the global art world, sending provocative signals to and from China. The starting point for the project was simple: we invited the artists that Antenna Space represents and collaborates with, and then sent out further invitations to artists who we thought would engage in interesting critical conversations with them. To my mind, Antenna Space has made its name with a program that skews emerging and conceptual, but also accounts for the painterly, the performative, the fleshy, and the technological. In the family of artists that circulate around the gallery, several key themes and languages appear: retro-futurism, encoded painting, symbolic embodiment. I have written the project into eight chapters, each of which adopts a particular sensibility or theme that intersects with these broader umbrellas and is intended to offer nothing more than a framework for conversation.

The English subtitle, “Is there anybody out there?” asks again the question posed by Pink Floyd on their 1979 rock opera The Wall: the protagonist, retreating into himself, sends out non-verbal distress signals in vain. The Chinese subtitle, “mixiu mixiu, did you get the signal?” is a line from the 2009 TV show Autumn’s Concerto, in which a young boy being raised by a single mother is told that his father is an alien living far away on a distant planet. When he tries to signal his father (also in vain), their codeword is mixiu mixiu: “Miss you, miss you.”

I am interested in the emotional resonance of the wounded little boy, two star-shaped antennae wobbling on top of his head, shouting at the sky in search of love. It is in this spirit that I would like to invoke the figure of the event horizon, which we have understood through movies as the position from which nothing escapes a black hole—the point of no return. As I am learning, there is an event horizon to every observer’s relationship to every object in a gravitational field, an invisible line over which whatever happens can no longer reach us as observers. At some infinitely distant theoretical point past the horizon of the cosmos in our expanding universe, signals sent towards us now will never arrive. We may extend our antenna infinitely—and we will—but our hope is our only defense against the impossible.

Taken in total, “Horizons” organizes a wildly diverse group of extraordinary and singular artists around an admittedly arbitrary vision of the antenna, the satellite, the probe, something sent from an era of projected science fantasy into the futures that have now become our pasts. This is not meant to be a serious analysis of science fiction; it is a romance, a story of love and loss, a natural history of grief, a meditation on the impossibility of connection across time and space.

Participating artists: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Dora Budor, Hilo Chen, Xinyi Cheng, Cui Jie, Simon Denny, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Buck Ellison, Carolyn Forrester, Owen Fu, Sayre Gomez, Guan Xiao, Han Bing, Tishan Hsu , Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Allison Katz, KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Josh Kline, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Heidi Lau, Li Ming, Yong Xiang Li, Liu Chuang, Jr-Shin Luo, Nancy Lupo, Mai Zhixiong, Helen Marten, Alexandra Noel, Peng Zuqiang, Tara Walters, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Xie Nanxing, Joseph Yaeger, Yu Honglei, Yu Peng, Zhao Gang, Zhou Siwei (alphabetically)

Words by the curator Robin Peckham.

Robin Peckham is a writer and curator who has provided strategic consulting services for private collections with a specialization in complex artist commissions, exhibition programs, and corporate projects. He is the Co-Director of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas. Previously, he served as Editor-in-Chief of LEAP, the international art magazine of contemporary China, and founded the Hong Kong project space Saamlung.