Red Brick Art Museum | Lecture & Discussion：This Future of Ours

14:00 – 15:30
Lecture: Migrating Images from Local to Global and the Cultural Turn of Geography
In the digital era, images migrate through time and space around the world as fast as they are produced. This migration towards any direction goes from local to global and needs mapping. There is a broad set of issues to be considered before trying to engage in doing a kind of atlas for migrating images which come from cinema or video art, as well as from TV, smartphones or any computer. Where do they come from? What for? Which is their role in the art world? Who decides their transmission? What is their power? This lecture will also address the cultural turn of geography, which is usually considered as one of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences since globalization took over and a new array of theoretical impulses coming from fields formerly peripheral to the social sciences were reactivated, specially poststructuralism, cultural studies, literary criticism, linguistics and art theory, which provide the tools and skills to analyze the socially constitutive role of cultural processes and systems of signification.

Lecturer: Dr. Menene Gras Balaguer
Dr. Menene Gras Balaguer graduated from the University of Barcelona. She is now Director for Culture and Exhibitions at CASA ASIA and the Director of the CAFW (Casa Asia Film Week). She had taught Aesthetics at the University of Barcelona. She is also an art critic and curator. She had been Director of the seminar ASIAN MAPS within the ARCO Art Fair in Madrid from 2004 to 2015 and the Spanish correspondent for ARTFORUM (New York) for more than 12 years. Exhibitions she curated include: the Spanish Pavilion of the Lima Biennale in 1997, a retrospective show organized in homage to Nam June Paik in 2006, MA YANSONG: Between the Global Modernity and the Local Tradition from 2012 to 2013, and Beijing Time: La Hora de China from 2009 to 2010. She also publised over thirty books and catalogues for the past three decades.

15:45 – 17:30
Topic of discussion: The Relationship between Globalization and Local Narratives
Nowadays, local narratives are intertwined with the political, economic conditions of a globalized society and they also become asource of inspirations for artistic creation. Meanwhile, local narratives areclosely related to contemporary issues of social engagement, site-specificity,and social function. For this discussion, we will invite artists, curators, andaudiences to discuss this issue in relation with the artistic reflections represented in the exhibition This Future of Ours.

Moderator: Jin Hua
Jin Hua graduatedwith a BA from the PLA’s Nanjing Foreign Language Institute majored in English; graduate with a Master of Art Administration from The College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, Australia. He is now supervisor to postgraduates in art administration at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was once an advisor to Art Stage Singapore (2011, 2012 & 2013 editions); Press officer of ShContemporary (2007 & 2008 editions).