Shot on the Thai island of Ko Yao Yai and set amidst the environmental change caused by global warming, Warm Spell explores the economic and cultural challenges the island faces as it shifts from a predominantly farming community to one dependent on tourism. The work constructs a ghostly presence, weaving it through the traces of disparity in climate change amongst high and low emission countries, and the experiences of tourism based on racial representations. This event is offered as an informal ‘preface’ to On Attachments and Unknowns, as part of a series that actively contributes to questions of dialogue and exchange wrought by artists across and around regions of the Pacific. Warm Spell was co-commissioned by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Salford University Art Collection. Supported by Elephant Trust London and Rijksakademie Amsterdam.
Shen Xin’s practice engages with film, video installation and performative events. Her work fabricates the process of producing abstraction of inclusivity and foreignness, forming ways to be known to others that is reflexive of images’ representational agencies. Recent solo presentations include Methods of Inhabiting, K11 Shanghai (2018), Sliced Units, Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2018), half-sung, half spoken, Serpentine Pavilion, London (2017) and At Home, Surplus Space, Wuhan, China (2016). Recent group shows include New Metallurgists, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2018), Songs for Sabotage, the New Museum Triennial, New York (2018), and The New Normal, UCCA, Beijing (2017). Shen was awarded the BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017, and she is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
