Unit of Interdependency

Artist/Collective | WANG Yu-Ping, LEE Chia-Hung, HUANG I-Chieh, LIAO Xuan-Zhen, LI Kuei-Pi, Neng Sheng Xing Factory, Trapped Citizen, Sean Xie, Socialimage Studio
Curator | SUN Yi-Cheng
Date | 2018/8/18-2018/10/28
Opening | 2018/8/18 (Sat.) 4 pm
Venue | TheCube Project Space

The exhibition “Unit of Interdependency” is developed from the on-going project “Selves-Educating” founded in 2016. The project centers on the process of knowledge production and the experiment of re-defining contemporary knowledge. Seeing art as an alternative approach to produce knowledge, this exhibition has grown out from the project, Selves-Educating, to focus on the collectives or communities formed for co-production (of art and/or alternative knowledge), as well as the political subjects constructed during the process of co-production in which common ideology and active/resistant agencies are established via negotiation. For this exhibition, these self-organizing political subjects, which co-produce art/alternative knowledge, are seen as the “unit of interdependency” for us to re-imagine an ideal society.

*More information of artist/collective talk from Trapped Citizen and the screening event will be announced soon.

∎ Exhibition
The exhibition “Unit of Interdependency” initiates from the contradiction of nuclear families and communities in contemporary society. Firstly, families are the smallest units of relationships recognized by the Taiwanese legal system, and are usually considered as the fundamental units that made up human society. However, after the industrialization and urbanization of Taiwan since 1960s, the mode of production and the structure of economic has changed, and a (nuclear) family becomes more-and-more an individualized and isolated unit that is irrelevant to co-production. Secondly, since the 1990s policy of the integrated community construction, communities have sometimes been shaped into culture-economical co-dependent communities with pouring resources, and other times city nails forced to demolish under the land development or urban renewal plans. The challenges faced by nuclear families and communities today, and the assumption, according to Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that human societies are constructed with small fundamental group units which should be protected by the State, remind us to re-construct a new perspective of recognizing the “Unit of Interdependency” as a reference for re-defining “the fundamental group unit for constructing human societies”.

Hence, through artistic collectives, atypical families, temporary settlements, and DIT (Do It Together) communities, this exhibition repetitively asks “today, are we able to build a society with more active/resistant agencies by the alternative knowledge-producing Unit of Interdependency?”

∎ Curator
SUN Yi-Cheng
Born in 1990, Taipei, Taiwan. Graduated from Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts,Taipei National University of the Arts, and the Department of Life Science, National Taiwan University. As a curator and co-organizer of archipiélago community (TW-bioart community), she takes curatorial practice as approach to produce alternative knowledge and take community-building as fundamental work to cooperate with others. Recently, as an assistant curator, work in TheCube Project Space.