Asia Art Archive in India and Serendipity Arts Trust are pleased to present Passage: The Life of a Wall on Lin He Road by Nonny de la Peña at the Serendipity Arts Festival.
Recognised for using cutting-edge technologies to tell both fictional and news-based stories that create immersive, empathic engagement on the part of viewers, Nonny de la Peña draws from AAA's Collection to create a new iteration of Safely Manoeuvring Across Lin He Road (1995) by New York and Beijing-based artist Lin Yilin.
In the initial performance, Lin built a wall of bricks in the middle of a busy roadway in Guangzhou. As the artist moved across, he gradually brought the wall along—forcing cars to detour around him. For Passage: The Life of a Wall on Lin He Road, de la Pena recreates the environment of Guangzhou in the 1990s through an immersive virtual reality experience where participants take on Lin's role as roadside artist.
Lin's conceptual practice often embraces sculpture, installation, photography, and moving image media that feature outdoor performances involving architectural and urban construction motifs; and he shares a mutual interest in issues affecting changing urban city life with de la Peña. Using digital technology, de la Peña does not simply re-enact Lin's performance but creates an experiential encounter that pushes boundaries: between artist as maker, audience as receiver, and art as conceptual or visceral.
*A limited number of open places will be added to the daily schedule, to be filled on-site on a first come, first serve basis.
This project was first exhibited by Asia Art Archive at Art Basel in Hong Kong 2017, as part of 15 Invitations for 15 Years, marking Asia Art Archive's fifteenth anniversary. The creation of this project was supported by Lavina & William Lim and is brought to India for the first time with the support of Serendipity Arts Trust.
Nonny de la Peña is known for her work as "The Godmother of Virtual Reality," co-founding Emblematic Group in the United States. A Yale Poynter Media Fellow and former Annenberg Fellow at USC School of Journalism and Communications, her work has been featured through the BBC, Engadget, Games For Change, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, The New York Times, Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, Vice, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wired, and World Economic Forum in Davos, among other international outlets.
Lin Yilin lives and works in New York and Beijing. He co-founded the artist group Big Tail Elephants in 1990 and participated in Cities on the Move (1997); 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997); 1st Taipei Biennial (1998); 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002); 50th Venice Biennale (2003); documenta 12 (2007); 10th Lyon Biennale (2009); 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition (2014); and the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), among other international exhibitions.
Serendipity Arts Trust (SAT) is an arts and cultural development trust created to support the arts as a significant contributor to civil society. SAT promotes new creative strategies, artistic interventions, and cultural partnerships to address the social, cultural, and environmental milieu. SAT programmes are designed through interdisciplinarity collaborations across a multitude of fields, using the arts to impact education, social initiatives, and community development programmes, and to better understand the shared histories of the subcontinent.
