- Overview - 

Vanessa Billy  | Fossil Afterlife

Vanessa Billy is looking for ways to engage physically in a contemporary world geared towards consumption of finished goods. Presenting works spanning over a decade she will discuss her sculptural and installative practice, which started with picking up waste in skips and has developed to use both handmade and industrial materials. Contrary to evolutionist models Billy proposes hybrid forms as a way to escape the dualism between nature and culture, an attempt to inscribe the human in a de-hierarchised continuum. Her installation reveals a complex materiality, in which each work is autonomous but comes together to create a landscape of altered nature. This ensemble simulates a mechanised, or industrially produced, environment in which the metabolisms of animals and plants have gone awry. In this way the artist makes tangible the myriad of macro and micro alterations inflicted on the earth and other life forms.

Shuyi Cao | Speculative Geology, Paradoxical Kin

The talk focuses on the speculative geology addressed in her recent explorations of material and technological approaches to layered temporalities and latent terrains in a more-than-human world, navigating through incompatible scales and relational affinity across a myriad of networked life forms.

- Organizer & Speakers -

Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a Beijing-based, globally active art historian and curator. Her research interests include global exhibition histories, Asian geopolitics, infrastructure, decolonization and the Anthropocene in Northeast China. Her recent exhibitions include “Three Contested Sites—The Worldly Fables of the Long 1990s” (co-curated with Nikita Cai), “Resonances of One Hundred Things” (OCAT Biennale 2021), “From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna” (Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival 2020), “Photoethics: CHINAFRICA” (2020) and “Ni Jun: An Inconvenient Case” (2019). Mia Yu was the winner of theYishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art in 2018, the recipient of the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship in 2017 and the winner of the CCAA Art Critic Award in 2015. She was also nominated for the Curator of the Year Award for the 14th AAC Art Awards in 2019. Mia Yu’s research essays appeared at the book Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000  published by Afterall Exhibition Research Center and Bard College as well as other art journals. Her video essays have been exhibited at Times Art Center Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Guangdong Times Museum, Villa Vassilieff Paris and Asia Society Hong Kong. In 2021, Mia Yu initiated the long-term para-curatorial project “North x Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges”.

‍ - Speaker - 

Vanessa Billy

Vanessa Billy is concerned with intrinsic and transformative properties of materials, with the materialisation of processes of constant exchange within our environment and between humans and other living beings. The artist uses a wide range of organic and synthetic materials and waste products, including bronze, bio-resin, or waste oil; as well as industrial objects such as electric cables offcuts, disused car engines or obsolescent light bulbs. Thematically, Billy's sculptural practice explores ecological issues, energy cycles, dystopian visions and alchemical processes. She draws parallels between physical and mental constructs and questions the impact of human activity on the planet. 

Her solo shows include: 'Dear Life', Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, FR (2017); 'We dissolve' Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, 'Sustain sustain', Collective, Edinburgh, UK (2014). Recent group shows include: 'Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age', Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, DE (2021); 'Swiss Sculpture 1945 to today' Kunsthaus Aarau, CH (2021); ‘WE HYBRIDS!’, Istituto Swizzero, Roma, IT (2020); 'Slow Objects', The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK (2017).

Shuyi Cao

Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist whose practice explores alchemical approaches to object-making and knowledge production through archaeological speculation and ecological fiction. Her mixed-medium installations synthesize various organic and inorganic materials, natural and artificial processes. Combining hand-crafted sculptures and digital artifacts, moving images, and sounds, the assemblage suggests heterogeneous material temporality. Her work has been internationally exhibited in China, the United States, and Canada, including Today Art Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery Kunming, Chronus Art Center, Banff Centre for the Arts, Chambers Fine Art, Fou Gallery, A.I.R. 13th Biennale, among others. She is the recipient of the Today Art Museum Wang Shikuo Nomination Award, The New School Tishman Environment and Design Center Research Grant, MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists Grant. She is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, faculty at Parsons School of Design, and has presented at Pioneer Works, NEW INC New Museum, Power Station of Art, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the City University of Hong Kong. She received a Bachelor of Laws from Fudan University in Shanghai (2013), an M.A. in Public Administration from Fudan University (2016), and an M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, New York (2018). 

 - About the Project - 

“Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond” is developed under the collaborative research framework of “North × Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges” (“Northern × Anthropocene” for short). Initiated by Mia Yu on the platform of WU SPACE, “Northern × Anthropocene” supports co-learning, collective walking, seminars, exhibitions, commissions, publications, etc. and seeks to explore the deep narratives behind the intersection of energy development, mineral extraction, industrial infrastructure, ecological transformation, and personal perceptions from the Northeast. The establishment of coal mines, iron ore mines, hydroelectric power stations, oil bases, and large-scale mechanized farming areas in the early 20th century rendered the Northeast the earliest heavy industrial base in modern China and its natural resources a battleground for large-scale resource exploitation. Infrastructure at a planetary scale witnesses a mix of colonial modernity and socialist industrial modernity and profoundly embodies the legacy of the Cold War. Admittedly, the New China owes its energy security and food security to modern technologies but they also have far-reaching effects on the local geology, landforms, hydrology, vegetation, and climate. “Northern × Anthropocene” situates the ecological transformation of the Northeast’s large-scale infrastructures in a spatio-temporal stack of deep geological time, the flux of 20th century history, personal perceptions, and future imagination. Through co-learning and collaboration, participants will observe the complex entanglements between coal, crude oil, water bodies, crust, soil, plants and animals, and people, develop ecological, cross-species wisdom from first-hand experience in the North, and imagine the future in a new ecological practice led by technologies.

- Supported by -

Pro Helvetia