CURRENT |不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland | Phase Four: Corin Sworn: Variations of Assembly & Nashashibi/Skaer : Chimera

CURRENT |不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland | Phase Four

Corin Sworn: Variations of Assembly
Nashashibi/Skaer : Chimera

Exhibition Dates: 22 May – 22 August 2021
Venue: OCAT Museum, Shenzhen, China

Following three successful phases collaborating with leading art organisations in China since 2015, Cooper Gallery’s major international project CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland moves into its final phase in May 2021 at OCAT Shenzhen Museum. Phase Four features two exhibitions by Turner Prize nominated artists Lucy Skaer and Rosalind Nashashibi (collaborating as Nashashibi/Skaer) and the winner of 2015 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Corin Sworn.

Querying and queering historical details, cultural capital and techniques of revolutionised management Phase Four of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland captures a passing likeness of ‘the contemporary’ in all its immediate and impatient necessity.

In this final fourth phase following previous iterations in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, CURRENT arrives in a ‘city of the future’, Shenzhen. Resisting the appeal of that future, CURRENT seizes the inherently discursive choreography of ‘the contemporary’, composing a concrete reality disciplined by the circumstances and radical insights that constitute this untimely moment.

Composed of three films, Chimera the exhibition by Nashashibi/Skaer traverses mythology, nature, language and interpretation to elucidate the protean metamorphosis underpinning ‘the contemporary’. Examining the act of looking and the transformative potential of film, Chimera reprises Paul Nash’s evocative 1944 painting Flight of the Magnolia in Our Magnolia and blurs the distinctions between the wild and the farmed in Lamb and its sequel Bear, a newly produced film which features a soundtrack created in collaboration with Cantonese Opera singers.

Corin Sworn’s solo exhibition Variations of Assembly encompasses architecture, sound, video and dance to explicate the undercurrents of monitoring, movement, sincerity and drive that score ‘the contemporary’. Featuring a new multi-media installation Habits of Assembly II and artist publication Folding Vesuvius, Sworn’s exhibition appropriates 20th Century time-motion-studies to unpick the false claims to virtuousness and efficiency declared by industrial discipline. Created specifically for this exhibition, the poems and images in Folding Vesuvius explore the tacit modes of assessment folded within the managerial systems of industrialised labour.