Urban Synesthesia

From October 17, 2015 - January 10, 2015, the exhibition URBAN SYNESTHESIA will be present at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, an exhibition that brings together a diverse body of work by 12 international artists and teams from around the world whose works deal with sensory experience in aberrant textures of the urban landscape, often in chance discoveries or encounters. The city is a site with the potential for unbounded synesthesia when approached from an artistic perspective, in a kind of wandering. As a new form of nature, the variability contained within the city provides the opportunity for full immersion of the senses into a crossing over of states and language streams, once one has dislodged themselves from the subject position of busy utilitarian consumer bee. Construction in the city is invariably carried out in rational fashion, with utilitarian objectives, geared towards facilitating the most efficient capacity to produce and consume goods and services; and yet the city remains a contradiction with its tension between renewal and decay, and the ruptures created by historical discontinuities, shifts in power operations and structures. When a build first appears in its pristine condition it stands strictly positioned in a network of ascendent power. But as nature works its effect on the construction and the surrounding exterior environment changes, the meaning, and guarantee of its meaning, begins to fray, it’s utilitarian use begins to subside. Wayward signs are produced which cannot be traced back to referents. If one allows oneself to lose themselves in the sensory disarray, new perceptions and ways of experiencing can be uncovered.