2023.02.11 Saturday 19:00
Location
2F, The Cloister Apartments, 62 West Fuxing Road, Shanghai
Speaker:Zhang Nian

Can storytelling of women be art? The answer is positive. If art is not concerned with exposing conflicts, then women would have to shapeshift based on their perceptions and to technically reinforce the illusional qualities. Intuitive input and representative output are dominated by visuals, while storytelling propelled by primitive desires goes seamlessly with women’s clamorous nature. The talking woman does not exist. She is invisible and untouchable. She disappears in the walls like a mystic alchemist, disappearing in scenes full of lies. At the fringe, the emergence of the genealogy of memories depends on the technical media that performs the function of saving-simulation. There are resediment, which drift along the thin thread of maternity. There are monsters in every family and every house. The talking woman encounters the “monster” and exposes a situation that is buried deep in women’s consciousness.
Zhang Nian: Feminist philosopher, professor at the School of Humanities of Tongji University, doctoral supervisor. She has long focused on the resistance and critical research of women's desire, female consciousness, and self-consciousness, and her research areas include feminist theory, political philosophy and aesthetics, and her monographs include "Gender Politics and the State- On the Liberation of Women in China", “Female Trauma on Otological Phobia - From Hegel to Psychoanalysis", “ Hanna Arendt: The Origin of Politics", etc. She is the translator of The Ethics of Sexual Differences.

VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.