Visual Artists Guanyu Xu and Sheida Soleimani with moderator Pacifico Silano discuss their use of appropriation to examine political and personal histories in relation to their work on view at ICP in A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload through May 2, 2022.
About the Exhibition
A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload takes a long look at our worries and compulsive fascination with the proliferation of photographic images. In the 1920s, with the rapid increase in illustrated magazines and daily newspapers, commentators asked whether society could survive the visual inundation. Artists looked to mass-media imagery and archives of all kinds to rethink the world around them. The artists of Dada, surrealism, pop, situationism, conceptualism, and postmodernism were all, in different ways, horrified and mesmerized by the seemingly endless supply of images. They cast a critical eye over the clichés, stereotypes, and repetitive images, and looked to unearth alternative histories and counternarratives. From scrapbooks to internet memes, from collage and image appropriation to art made by algorithms, A Trillion Sunsets highlights unlikely parallels and connections across distinct decades.
About the Program Format
All programs will take place on Zoom. Those who register to attend will receive a confirmation email with a Zoom link located at the bottom of the email under ‘Important Information.’ The Zoom link can be used to join the programs through a computer or mobile device.
We recommend participants download the Zoom app on their device prior to the program. Learn how to download the latest version of Zoom to your computer or mobile device.
If you have questions about the virtual lecture or don’t receive the confirmation email, please contact: [email protected].
Speaker Bios
Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an assistant professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.
Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography
to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates this from the perspective as a Chinese gay man. In his work, Xu migrates between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity.
Event Price
This program is free with a suggested donation of $5.