Wang Ningde: In the Years of Ningde
© Wang Ningde, Youth Portrait No.01 (from the In the Years of Ningde), 2004
About The Exhibition
WDWGN! is a programme of online exhibitions at VASA Project that has been conceived and led by Rui Goncalves Cepeda since 2013. This programme of exhibitions is build around the body as a subject and the authority of “geography” as a battleground between distinctive contemporary ideologies and contested conceptual territories.
Evolving around those two key conditions, the series of online photography exhibitions associate the physical and mental states of the body and of the being, on one hand. While, on the other, it addresses the contested territories of contemporary photography in a digital-democratising age and its limitations in terms of narrative capacity, as well as the energy essential for the long journey, as being a “journey of phases in which the thought we are immersed in is invalidate” (borrowing from Prof. Irit Rogoff thoughts expressed in her essay What is a Theorist?, from 2006).
The programme has started in October 2013 and since then has engaged with visual narratives and stories that have been brought by photographers from different sides of the world. Individuals that are engaged in a global conversation about the human condition and who share with wider audiences their ideas and views. This is a core message that can be contextualised with/in and speaks to the whole.
On a first moment, this series of exhibitions has explored and inquired into the dynamics of loss, of giving up, of moving away, and of being without (as they were expressed in the essay What is a Theorist?, by Prof. Irit Rogoff), through the works of photographers as Delio Jasse, Carlos Palma, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Adam Chodzko. On a second moment, Rui has looked into the works of Larson & Shindelman, Cristina Lucas, Marisa J. Futernick, and Rosangela Rennó, while focusing his attention on the bodily and mental states springing from the ideas of convergences, anxiety, destruction, deceleration, deficit and chance. More recently, the engagement with works by Nadine Fraczkowski, Kimiko Yoshida, Tatiana Macedo, and, presently, with Wang Ningde, deals with ideas surrounding the body, like freedom, disappearance, repetition, choice, determination, and change.
Rui Goncalves Cepeda
Curator
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On VASA Exhibitions:
VASA Exhibitions over the years have provided a platform for individual and group exhibitions, collaborative exhibitions with various organizations and galleries and exhibitions that follow a particular theme or inquiry such as “Where Do We Go Now” curated by Rui Cepeda and the “Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics” curated by Igor Manko.
VASA Exhibitions are international and multicultural. The curatorial team has strived to present work that not only represents the photographers but also the social, historical and cultural. As an online international project, VASA works to engage various digital tools. Video, as an example, not only offers the potential for the presentation of works, it provides the opportunity and framework for the voice of the author to be seen and heard. Through image, text, sound and animation, VASA works to expand the exhibition paradigm and provide a rich experience for the viewer (as well as the author).
VASA Exhibitions provides a viewing and research environment by archiving all of the exhibitions in their entirety. For example, the viewer may view a 2009 exhibition as it was presented and not just traces of its existence.
VASA Exhibitions (a program in VASA) includes images, videos and sound works.