Suspensions of Disbelief, Other Gallery, Shanghai, October 24- November 28, 2010

Mookie Teembaum , Placebo I, c-print, 2009) [poster announcement] 

                               L to R: Erik Yahnker, Testicle, colored pencil, (2010); 

Stefano Cagol, September  11, LEDs, video, (2009)

                                   L to R: Stefano Cagol, Stefano Cagol, September  11, LEDs, video, (2009);  Wim  Delvoye, Cloaca, vinyl, feces in acrylic boxes, (2001); Adolfo Doring, Blackout, gelatin silver print, (2010); Stuart Croft, Scveral Small Fires, vidieo (2003); Zhou Wendou, Untitled, measruing tape, 2009); Teemu Maki, Teemu Maki , Por trait of Emma Joenpolvi and Inka Suhonen (from the seires, How to Be a Woman?) c-print on diasec, (2006)        

Teemu Maki , Portrait of Emma Joenpolvi and Inka Suhonen (from the seires, How to Be a Woman?) c-print on diasec, (2006); Eric Yahnker, Chinese Canned Corn, cans of corrn , 2010)

              

Matthew Weinstein,  American Gothic, bronze, paiint, chrome, violin string, (2003)

Wim  Delvoye, Cloaca, vinyl, feces in acrylic boxes, (2001)

Adolfo Doring, Blackout, gelatin silver print, (2010); Stuart Croft, Scveral Small Fires, vidieo (2003); Zhou Wendou, Untitled, measruing tape, 2009); Teemu Maki, Teemu Maki , Portrait of Emma Joenpolvi and Inka Suhonen (from the seires, How to Be a Woman?) c-print on diasec, (2006); Eric Yahnker, Chinese Canned Corn, cans of corrn , 2010); Antonis Donef, Untitled, ink on newspapers on canvas, 2009)   

Suspensions of Disbelief 

curated by Raul Zamudio 

Artists:

Stefano Cagol, lives and works in Rome

Wim Delvoye, lives and works in Ghent

Antonis Donef, lives and works in Athens

Adolfo Doring, lives and works in New York

Ferran Martin, lives and works in New York

Tomas Ochoa, lives and works in Berlin and Zurich

Miguel Rodriguez Sepulveda, lives and works in Mexico City

Kiki Seror, lives and works in San Francisco

Mookie Tenembaum, lives and works in Buenos Aires  

Zhou Wendou, lives and works in Beijing

Eric Yahnker, lives and works in Los Angeles

Suspensions of Disbelief is an exhibition of international artists that culls its title from the eighteenth-century Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He proposed that if a writer included elements in a narrative that the reader experientially acknowledged, the ensuing empathy would suspend disbelief in a story’s content regardless of how fantastic or unreal it may be. Coleridge’s motivation may have been to underscore that his own writings, including Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797-1798) and Kubla Khan (1797), were more than fabulist, literary works of imagination incapable of producing pathos in the reader. But real life, as the cliché goes, can be stranger than fiction.

The works in the exhibition compliment and complicate Coleridge’s thesis by teasing out the fictional in the factual and vice versa and in doing so, suspend certainty as well as disbelief.