2025.08.02 Saturday 19:00
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Speaker: Boedi Widjaja
东邪西毒 (I Want to Infect You with History) is a lecture-performance in which Singaporean, Indonesia-born artist Boedi Widjaja enters into dialogue with a cell, using a DNA-encoded poem as their shared medium. The poem carries fragments of ungrounded memory: ideals of nationhood at the 1955 Bandung Conference; the unstable (be)longing of Chinese Indonesians forced to choose a nationality; and the defiance of a prisoner who, denied pen and paper, whispered to his cellmates—his story smuggled out as fragments, later built into an epic.
As the cell-human exchange decodes the genetic verses, they ask: when history has lost its ground, how might it return to body and space? This dialogue suggests history as poison—seeping across borders, infecting bodies with memory and loss, yet also seeding transformation. The cycles of cellular replication and mutation reflect this inheritance of trauma, harboring within them the promise of renewal.
*With gratitude to the National Arts Council Singapore Creation Grant, ShanghART Gallery, the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science (IDMxS), and geneticist Professor Eric Yap.
Boedi Widjaja (b. 1975, Indonesia; based in Singapore) explores migration through the conceptual frames of house, home and homeland, engaging with space and semiotics. Trained in architecture and design, Boedi works across media—from bio art and performance to experimental photography and architectural installations—often combining scientific phenomena with poetic gesture. Boedi was an artist-in-residence in the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science (2024) and NTU CCA Singapore (2021). He is represented by ShanghART Gallery.
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.
