Horizons: South

Xinyi Cheng, Cui Jie, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Guan Xiao, Owen Fu, Guillaume Dénervaud, Covey Gong, Han Bing, Hongyan, Allison Katz, Mire Lee, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Li Ming, Shuang Li, Li Yong Xiang, Nancy Lupo, Peng Zuqiang, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Yu Honglei, Stella Zhong

Curated by Robin Peckham

When Antenna Space celebrated a tenth anniversary just a couple short years ago, the world was in a weirdly fragmented state. We called the exhibition "Horizons," after the hypothetical event horizon of an expanding cosmos, the place from which no signal could ever be received; we speculated that hope was our lone defense against the impossible—a protest against the infinite.

Today, the world remains fragmented, perhaps even more so than it was in those strange, post-pandemic days, when travel was again possible but the urge to connect felt like a distant memory. We see our technical networks breaking into closed circuits, China building and exporting a global alternative, Europe planning its own civic social networks, the United States a chaotic morass held together by the thin glue of fascism and artificial intelligence. For the first time in living memory, we are living in a truly multipolar world.

And yet, for those of us who were committed to living an actually-existing multipolarity from the beginning, none of this comes as a surprise. If "Horizons" represented a gesture of hope within the infinite void, an antenna extended without expectation, then let "Horizons (South)" stand as a celebration of finitude. Every choice, every action stands for a rejection of everything else that could possibly be done with this particular fragment of time. Bringing this group of artists and this sensibility of contemporary art to this place means something. We have to want it to mean something.

Are we as lonely as we were in the summer of 2023? Surely not, but we are less disoriented. We are more able to sit with the finitude of dislocation and disconnection.

Antenna continues to do the work of weaving an energy field. Here, this finite space consists of two rooms, one a bit larger and open to the horizon, the other a self-contained airlock. The airlock hosts two of the clusters that appeared in "Horizons": a loose affiliation of gothic ink, a kind of tongue-in-cheek punkification of an aesthetic world, and another anchored in the space of the symbolic codes of painting. The viewing deck hosts three clusters: a concern with the circulation of images in, a belief in the magic of transfiguration, and an insistence on spatial structure. A final cluster spans both rooms, spilling out through both sides of the narrow gap between them, circling the edge of the black hole that is the fragile, misshapen body in the vacuum of deep space.

A body is a human-shaped volume; a gallery is an indentation in space-time; art is a field of intensities. There is a magnetism to the form of things, and this horizon is an attractor that continues to play itself forward into the unknown, carrying onwards towards a point of no return.