ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Lecture with Carol Yinghua Lu

March 4, 2024·48 min·3 clips

Hajima Masumoto says he is creating "a post-revolutionary world ahead of time" in Koenji.

The evening begins formally. ACCA's room tone stays in the mix through thanks, acknowledgements of Wurundjeri Woiwurrung custodianship, and Max Delaney's introduction of Carol Yinghua Liu. The frame is institutional, very much a lecture room before it is a big idea. Liu is introduced as an art historian, curator, director of Beijing Inside Out Art Museum, and co-artistic director of the Eighth Yokohama Triennale. The triennale is close at hand. Its title, Wild Grass Our Lives, gives the lecture its way into post-revolutionary imagination and social relationship. Liu works historically. She maps a global contemporary art field shaped by capital, state agendas, cultural industry, and a quick buildout of art infrastructure. Biennales are part of that machinery. They are exhibitions, but also systems that helped train certain kinds of practice, discourse, and curatorial method. Her critique stays calm, which makes it sharper. She describes a depoliticized curatorial habit built around popular subject matter and themes borrowed from cultural studies. Curatorial education also comes in, with programs in Amsterdam and New York named as part of the same cultural-industry growth. The expansion brought real gains and real trouble. Cultural studies gave artists and curators more ways to think about social issues. It also made some works feel secondary to their topics, or too close to research displays without much artistic charge. Liu keeps returning to that friction. Near the end, she turns toward Asia and toward efforts to imagine post-revolutionary worlds inside current social relationships. Some details remain just out of reach. Posters, bushfires, beer bottles, speakers, and laptops hint at underground cultural practices still taking shape for the triennale. The ending stays open. Liu invites the audience to Yokohama in two weeks, without tying the lecture into a neat bow.

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