[Oberlist] Cai Guo-Qiang - 1040M Underground at IZOLYATSIA, Donetsk, Ukraine, 27 August-13 November 2011

[Tetyana Filevska]

* [image: logo.JPG]*

*Cai Guo-Qiang New Solo Exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang - 1040M Underground at
IZOLYATSIA, Donetsk, Ukraine, 27 August - **13** **November 2011*



PR Contact: Anton Korablev, Tetyana Filevska

anton.korablev at izolyatsia.org, tetyana.filevska at izolyatsia.org

+380 62 340 46 09 (office)

+380 67 503 23 69 (for international contacts)

+380 50 941 28 00 (for Ukrainian and Russian contacts)


(For immediate release)

 [image: _DSC3783_новый размер-1.jpg]



*Cai Guo-Qiang - 1040M Underground* opens on Saturday, 27 August through
Sunday, 13 November 2011 at *IZOLYATSIA. Platform For Cultural
Initiatives*in Donetsk. This marks Cai Guo-Qiang's first solo
exhibition in Ukraine and
will feature two new site-specific installations by the artist, including a
new series of gunpowder drawings produced on the *IZOLYATSIA* campus. The
artist will work closely with local painters, miners and volunteers to
create the gunpowder drawings on paper. The production process will be open
and free to the public, and audience members will be able to witness an
artist at work as well as experience first hand the ignition of the
gunpowder drawings.



The exhibition chronicles Cai's dialogue with the local community and their
history and culture. His work seeks to express the fate of people,
specifically the once-glorified laborers of the lower class in a rapidly
changing time. The exhibition also reveals new possibilities through
contemporary art: by transforming waste into treasure, we inherit and
practice the "Socialist ideal" of art for the people and art embedded in
life.



*Cai Guo-Qiang - 1040M Underground *stems from the artist's experience in
May to the coal and salt mines of the industrial Donbas region. During his
visit, Cai descended 1040 meters below ground level and trekked more than
1000 meters in the tunnel, mirroring the same route the coal miners take
every day. After his "journey to the center of the earth," a hike to the top
of the *IZOLYATSIA* *terrekon* - as "slag heaps" are known colloquially -
unveiled a breathtaking view of the city: white smoke from factory chimneys,
a bright orange waterfall of molten steel glistening in the sunset, and
statues of coal mining heroes that stand tall all over the city.



The first element of the exhibition, *Monuments on Shoulders*, is a
gunpowder drawing installation housed in the main gallery. The entire
gunpowder drawing making process will take place in front of a live
audience. Cai will first lead nine local Socialist Realist painters to
sketch 27 mine workers' portraits in the lobbies of the salt and coal mines.
Volunteers will then help carve the images into stencils and Cai will spread
different grades and grains of gunpowder onto the canvases according to
different effects he wishes to achieve. All 27 portraits will be ignited.
The finished gunpowder drawings will be mounted on frames identical to the
ones used to hold the portraits of Soviet leaders in propaganda parades,
spreading across a mound of coal to the left and a slope of salt to the
right in the gallery. The drawings will be lit with mining lamps, hanging
from the ceiling like stars.



*Nursery Rhymes*, the second component of the exhibition, will be situated
in the remnants of a factory building (Shop 2) destroyed by a fire. When
visitors enter the space, they will be instantly drawn to the soot-covered
interior of the building. Under dim lighting, nine used mining carts line up
as if meandering down the track in the tunnel, rocking slowly like cradles.
Each "cradle" contains a projection on the canopy: Ukrainian folk songs,
Soviet era athletes and other role models, communist propaganda films,
documentaries on the glorified lives of miners, and Socialist period art
films. Along the sides of the canopy will hang salvaged objects from the
days of the factory, such as old musical instruments from the factory club,
tiny chess boards from the factory kindergarten, and old workers' uniforms
and tools, all rocking along like a child's mobile.



*About the Artist*

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. Trained
in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy, his work has since crossed
multiple mediums within art, including drawing, installation, video and
performance art. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the
properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to
his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the
development of his signature explosion events. Drawing upon Eastern
philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, these
projects and events aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the
larger universe around them, utilizing a site-specific approach to culture
and history. Cai was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in
1999, the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 20th Fukuoka Asian
Culture Prize in 2009. He was Director of Visual and Special Effects for the
opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In
2008, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York*. *In Fall 2010, Cai created *Odyssey *for the Museum of
Fine Arts Houston.  Installed as one of the museum's ongoing Portals
Project, it is one of his largest gunpowder drawings to date.  He currently
lives and works in New York.



*About the Foundation*

*IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural Initiatives* is a multidisciplinary art
foundation located on the territory of a former insulation materials plant
in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. *IZOLYATSIA*'s mission is to preserve the
region's industrial heritage, and to inspire social and cultural development
through the process of cultural conversion. The foundation's activity is
focused on the realisation of site-specific projects, involvement of local
community and education. *IZOLYATSIA* held its first residency program for
young Ukrainian artists in the summer of 2010, which will be followed by an
international artists-in-residence program for photographers curated by
Boris Mikhailov to take place this summer. The foundation also launched its
educational program dedicated to the topic of art in contemporary society in
February 2011.

*IZOLYATSIA*'s philosophy of preservation, regeneration and re-inscription
into contemporary modes of life through sustainable technologies is also
reflected in the physical transformation of the factory site. The former
warehouse, which serves as a gallery space, is to be reconstructed,
preserving its industrial interior and demonstrating that trivial sites,
spaces and materials can be adopted to give a second life to a well-known
object. Similarly, the surrounding area of seven acres, which includes a
slag-heap, will be transformed into an environmentally sustainable park
space for artistic and recreational use. The landscape will demonstrate the
use of sustainable techniques involving the remediation of pollution,
soiling, planting and reforestation, land profiling, surface water drainage
and introduction of biodiversity. *IZOLYATSIA* aims to achieve environmental
and cultural rehabilitation for the city of Donetsk and the surrounding
areas, which would be the first of its kind in Ukraine.



http://www.caiguoqiang.com

http://www.izolyatsia.org

For downloading press images

username: press

password: xiexie
-- 
*Tetyana Filevska*, project coordinator
tetyana.filevska at izolyatsia.org
+38 067 503 23 69

*IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural Initiatives*
www.izolyatsia.org
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