Deji Art Museum
In the Line of Flight, for Possible Worlds
Creative direction and production for an image and video series for the museum’s first exhibition focusing on digital art.
The exhibition In the Line of Flight, for Possible Worlds, gathers a plethora of worlds. These are worlds between visceral entrapment (ZHANG Peili) and an unreal journey (Jakob Kudsk Steensen); mystic parables of the ancient (ZHOU Xiaohu) juxtaposed with quotidian stories of urbanity (Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson); Avatar, obsessed with the sunset, may envy the intimacy that only lovers can share in the real world (LIN Ke); and fantastic game-land (LU Yang) vying with whimsical metamorphosis of humans and flies (Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau); the mudland of geology bricolaged in culture and nature (Pierre Huyghe) permeates into an underwater dreamland of technology, power, corruption, art, and warfare all propelled by artificial intelligence (Hito Steyerl); a toast from the ether-land caresses Covid-stricken fatigue (Dorian Gaudin and Zachary White); finally, a literal flight out of the fossil world (Tomás Saraceno) ushers us into the cosmic grandeur of the time immemorial (Arthur Ganson).
About the Curator
Zhang Ga
ZHANG Ga is a media art curator. He is Distinguished Professor and Vice Dean of the Institute of Sci-Tech Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts, China. He has curated numerous exhibitions including Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and Symposium (2004- 2006) and three editions of the Media Art Triennial (National Art Museum of China, 2008-2014). His recent curatorial projects include Topologies of the Real : Techne Shenzhen 2022 (Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, 2022), We=link series of online programs (2020-2021), The 6th Guangzhou Triennial (co-curator, Guangzhou, 2018), Machines Are Not Alone (Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum, 2018), unREAL: The Algorithmic Present (co-curator, HeK Basel, 2017), Datumsoria: The Return of the Real (ZKM, 2017) and Wrap around the Time (co-curator, Nam June Paik Art Center, 2016). ZHANG Ga has lectured on media art and culture around the world and published essays and edited books with the MIT Press, October, Flash Art International, Liverpool University Press, among others. Since 2015, he directs Chronus Art Center in Shanghai and currently is also co-curator of ZKM | Hong Media Art collection.