Inside

Inside

Installation / 3-channel video / Speakers / 35min. / 2019

My research work for “Inside” started in the Free Trade Zone in Shanghai, at the “International Artwork Exchange Center” then under construction. With this project, I explore issues related to the freeports for art storage, also using translation processes to raise questions about the structural conditions for the type of global finance systems at work in these Art Free Ports.
After Shanghai, I continued my exploration at the Geneva Art Free Port. There, in front of the first Free Port of the kind, I staged and filmed a translation sequence. The Free Port of Geneva serves here as the film setting where interpreter Ti Wang simultaneously interprets from Mandarin Chinese into English the conversation I recorded during my visit at the construction site of the “International Artwork Exchange Center” in Shanghai.
Another part of “Inside” approaches the interior of the Art Free Port. The impossibility of filming with my camera the real Inside has led me into the domain of Virtual Reality and to the places where these realities are designed, the VR studios. At the volumetric production studios “4D Views” in Grenoble, the interpreter Ti Wang, works again between the Chinese and English language. This time, she interprets the texts that I have mandated from Chinese and Swiss lawyers and historian specialising on the question of Free Ports. Each of them gave explanations and comments on terms I had proposed, like “Territory”, “Offshore”, “Technique”… . As the interpreter translates these recorded audio files at the “4DViews” studio, she is led with the help of VR glasses inside a fictional 3D Art Free Port, created according to my indications.
All these work phases and interpreting processes were filmed in their entirety and edited together with the different voices into a 3-channel video installation.
The transfer of these themes pertaining to Art Free Ports into a place of translation, of performative language, and virtual reality, allows me to create space for interruption, and gives way to possible insights on the overlaps between the fields of economic policies, financial structures and art markets.

Filmed in front of the Free Port in Geneva, the International Artwork Exchange Center in Shanghai, and in “4DViews” VR studio in Grenoble.

« Inside » Text by Hera Chan

Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022, Article by Faizal Khan