During the evening Rajyashri Goody (1990, Pune, India), and Shen Xin (1990, Chengdu, China) will tell us about their works and screen a selection of images and videos. The interview will be moderated by art historian Tineke Reijnders.

Both artists have joined us from the cross-cultural exchange program by the Rijksakademie and the Asia Culture Complex (ACC) in Gwangju, South-Korea. The evening will start with a short introduction about the program.

Shen Xin’s practice engages with moving image and event. In her works the aspect of time, the time of making and watching, constructs opportunities to render present the un-representable, the indigestible and the irrelevant. These subjects are looked at through examining the techniques and effects of circulations in socio-political power structures. For Shen, to dismantle the structures that dominate is to commit to the complexity of generating reflexiveness in the works, of how emotions, judgments and ethics circulate through individual and collective subjects. 

Rajyashri Goody is an artist and ethnographer exploring socially engaged art and art as activism. With an academic background in visual anthropology and sociology, her research interests lie in interpretations of power structures in India, particularly the caste system. Currently, she is exploring (through text and installation) eating and drinking practices within minority Dalit (so called untouchable) communities and constructs of ritual purity and pollution that stem from specific consumption patterns. Keeping in mind the power of writing in a society where a large number of people have been historically denied an education for generations in order to keep them in their caste position, she has just begun working on a ‘cookbook’ that attempts to deal with a food culture, passed on orally and through practice, steeped in the politics of hunger, discrimination, and shame.

You can find more information about the program on the airWG website.