On the occasion of the book launch “Speculative Grounds – Positions on Beijing’s Transformation” we invite you to take a walk through greater Beijing’s urban transformation.

The publication marks a first retrospect on the Beijing22 project initiated by curators Antonie Angerer, Anna-Viktoria Eschbach and photographer Jannis Schulze. The response of Beijing’s committee “no snow, no problem” to wondering journalists on how the winter Olympics of Beijing would be able to take place in such a snow scarce place, marked the starting point for the project, choosing 2022 as a timeframe to investigate the urban changes happening until and because of the winter Olympics. The proclamation of making the impossible possible was a glimpse into the drastic transformation greater Beijing would be facing in the years to come.

Researcher and curator Antonie Angerer will introduce the publication “Speculative Grounds – Positions on Beijing’s urban transformation”. She will give glimpses into the works developed by an interdisciplinary group of artists, researchers, architects and many others within the research project Beijing22. The lecture will travel to future cities, search for green mushrooms, while hearing from different social worlds about their dreams, their experiences and the reality of living sandwiched between the yet to come what has already been lost.

The book launch at C* Space in Berlin will also have a small exhibition of the project “Beijing Mushroom” by Yu Gong and Zhangbolong Liu. Next to photographs taken on their speculative mushroom hunt around Beijing, the zine published by postpost will be make its first appearance in Germany.

About the participants:

Antonie Angerer: Curator and co-founder of artistic Beijing -based research platform I: project space around topics of urbanization, gender concepts in the Asia Pacific, independent space practice, and new media and digital art practices. Editor at tria publishing platform. Co-founder of the Independent art space festival Beijing. She is currently writing her PHD on the function of urban media in China’s early rural-urban transformation processes. Her research is part of the research project “Social Worlds: China’s cities as spaces of worldmaking” at the University of Würzburg.

Yu Gong was born in Beijing. She is interested in space and she has been to many places. She became a researcher at the Terraforming program of Strelka Institute, Moscow. She now works in Shanghai as an innovation strategist.

Zhangbolong Liu, artist, translator. He has won Ryan R Gibbs Award for Photography (Baton Rouge, 2014) and Shiseido Prize (Three Shadow Photography Art Center, Beijing, 2014). His recent shows include The Isolated and the Destroyed at Taikang Space, Beijing (2020); Diagonal at Magician Space, Beijing (2020); Quasi-Nature: Bio Art, Borderline and Laboratory at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, Beijing (2019). His curatorial practice include The Imagination of a Museum at J: GALLERY, Shanghai (2018).

Host

Antonie Angerer, I: Project Space & University of Würzburg

Venue

C* Space, Langhansstraße 86, 13086 Berlin-Weissensee.

More Information

For more information please visit this website: www.beijing22.org

Contact: contact[at]yi-projectspace.org