New
Silk
Road
Exhibition
The 4 Session of the Silk Road International Art Festival
16 September-3 October 2017
10.00-17.00
@ Xi’an Art Museum
Xi’an, Shaanxi
P.R. China
The annual Silk Road International Festival is an international festival which is hosted by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China and Shanxi Provincial People’s Government and organized by the Department of Culture of Shaanxi Province. As an important part of the festival, the International Art Exhibition has been successfully held three times since 2014. The number of participating countries has increased significantly from around 10 to 81 since 2014, and there were 190 artists from 81 countries participating in the Third Silk Road International Art Exhibition in 2016.
Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, Shaanxi Provincial People’s Government
CLASH is a sculpture and an spatial social tool enabling such a re-imagination. It consists of a social space and of a shelter simultaneously protecting and threatening it.
CLASH contains a (symbolic) table with tables, a place to meet, to sit, to exchange and to play as well as a shelter that functions also as a landmark of CLASH.
CLASH refers to the clash of the encountering systems and functions as a social tool for bargaining, exchange and cross-fertilization. CLASH is made out of elements that are to be transformed and expanded by visitors, tourists, artists, and inhabitants of Xi’an. The futuristic and utopian installation CLASH embraces a social space and a shelter.
The installation CLASH is presented as a participatory open space for the public to communicate and acknowledge the visiting culture which can stimulate the host culture to respond: with actions of adaptation and appropriation, with conflict and complexity where stabilizers and dynamics, continuities and discontinuities, and harmonic-flow and fault-lines of cultural development are synchronically embodied as integral parts of our daily operation and experience. This is a CLASH, a creative cultural collision.