UNNAMED RIVER

In October 2021, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL jointly launched the Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image at the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival. The award aims to support young creative forces in photography and moving image art and to discover and nurture outstanding young Chinese curators and researchers working with these mediums. Award-winning curator Jiang Feiran's first exhibition project Unnamed River was officially presented to the public on March 19, 2022, at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing.

In November 2021, Jiang Feiran won the inaugural Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image with her project Unnamed River that stood out in the Award Exhibition at the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen. After three months of deepening the Unnamed River project, the exhibition is now officially presented to the public at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. The exhibition features photography and video works by eleven invited artists: Cai Dongdong, Chen Wei, Chen Xiaoyi, Hu Jiayi, Kang Kaiwen, Li Shun, Shao Wenhuan, Tang Chao, You Daren, Yu Hang, and Wang Jiaxin. Unnamed River attempts to cast a new light on the concept of view of image time based on "the decisive moments" and the historical views behind them, questioning the "titled" interpretive images that name events and moments. By re-discovering three "famous scenes" in the image history, it tries to redevelop the latent imagery of the “unnamed” moments in the river without banks.

From the perspective of the image itself, the exhibition Unnamed River takes the perceptual experience of spatial vision as a channel to provide a space for reflection and interrogation of today's homogeneous and monotonous social time, as well as moment-oriented image concepts. At the exhibition, a red horizontal laser ray cuts across the entire exhibition hall, homogeneously projecting onto all objects in the space. You can see this datum line cutting through the whole room as the linear time is represented by the clock scale in contemporary society, which indiscriminately passes through everything to project on every audience member that enters the hall.This thin red ray, like a mere cordon, represents the reality of time, while the linear view of history reflected by it is also a vial object of conversation in the exhibition.

A laser ray in the exhibition hall illuminates the dark waves of the flowing, unnamed river, where three irregular walls float, like remnants of history stranded in the mainstream narrative. These three walls divide the exhibition into three chapters, corresponding to the curator's standpoint and her three questions about image-time: the duration time of the non-decisive moment in “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare”, the broken, dislocated, and reconstructed time in "The Odessa Steps", and the synchronic time in the cyclical movements of "Muybridge's Horse." Through various experiments by the artists on the image itself, the exhibition attempts to reveal the undercurrent of history remnants buried in the depths of the Unnamed River by redirecting the lens and gazing at these obscured objects, rediscovering their energy and potential to press on questions that seem to have been answered definitively but actually have not yet been thoroughly developed.

During the exhibition, the curator Jiang Feiran will have an in-depth discussion with artists and scholars on the topic of the Re-contemplation on Image and Time. As part of the programme, the exhibition Unnamed River will tour ZiWU (Shanghai) on May 13, 2022. Jiang Feiran will also travel to France for the academic visit planned for the winner of the Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image after international travel resumes.

The Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image aims to support young creative forces in photography and moving image art: to discover and nurture outstanding young Chinese curators and researchers working with these mediums, as well as to encourage cross-disciplinary research via an open-call programme for curatorial proposals, and a committee of experts to select the finalists and the winner and support for academic projects. The committee of experts in photography, moving image, and curation who convened for the 1st Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image includes: Christoph Wiesner, Director of the Rencontres d'Arles and Co-director of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival; RongRong, contemporary Chinese photography artist as well as Co-founder and Co-director of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival; Gu Zheng, Art Director for the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival; Cao Dan, Senior Art Journalist, Curator, Documentary film director and Publisher of The Art Newspaper China & LEAP; Lu Mingjun, Doctor of History, Assistant Research Fellow at the School of Philosophy of Fudan University, Curator and Artistic Director of Surplus Space; He Yining, Photography Historian and Curator; and Ye Ying, Editor-in-chief of The Art Newspaper China.