Antenna Space is pleased to announce the opening of the project space. Inaugurated in Spring 2021, “Antenna-Tenna” is a commissioning program that further facilitate Antenna Space’s experimental programming and foster emerging artists. Independent of the gallery’s regular exhibitions, this alternative space adapting to the rhythm of the production cycles, provides context and opportunity for site-specific exhibitions with softness. Simultaneously, as a metaphorical escape, “Antenna-Tenna” continually questions the potential for institutions to re-enter the periphery of knowledge production, aiming to contemplate boundary, connection and fluidity in a broader and more discursive way.

Unfolding across the praxis of twelve artists, “Antenna-Tenna” retraces a cartography of sensibility that lies latent beneath established modes of social organization and art historical sequences. Through the threads of contingency, affect, fiction and self-fiction, the exhibition weaves loose yet rich connections among these works. Departing from historical moments of political pragmatism, this meandering cartography introduces a methodology of approaching artistic praxis and strategy: one that allows attention to rest on the blank-leaving between subjects, emphasizes correlation and its generation, and consistently preserves the openness of interpretation.

The state of “being absent-minded” becomes the artworks’ response to the chaotic contemporary. In the indirect language and free-flowing interaction, they jointly form an open visual system where the accurate symbolic or media archaeology is barely obtainable within, but is full of unincoprorated emotions, fictional narratives and flashbacks. This kind of spiritual detachment and defocus can be regarded as “world making”, because it recognizes the lack that is normalized as reality, makes us give up the inherent knowledge of daily life, and tries to deal with it through ephemerality and absence. It is both a critique and an additive or reparative gesture.

To measure each present moment with full perception, to meditate in distraction, to perceive the aura and witticism in random collages and responses – such practices are akin to observing the world through introspection and generating new connections; in essence, such reintegration from within outward is also a conception of potentiality and possibility, it weakens the structure of reality, and replaces it with another parallel time and place. Creation and remaking not only awaken the energy contained in the mundanity and intimacy, but also seek to intervene in the binary world reduced by institutions and ideologies with an alternative epistemology.

Like the vaguely intertwined chemtrails in the sky, “Antenna-Tenna” signifies a vast network of connections and correspondences, delineating a world that has not yet fully present, but is gradually emerging on the horizon; crossing the borderland between East and West, periphery and center, diasporic and congregative, it points to an elsewhere beyond the rifts of geopolitics and culture.

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B1-7, 9 Qufu Road, Jing’an, Shanghai

Wednesday to Saturday 11:00-18:30