Mad For Real at Tate Modern.

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

We are pleased to invite you to Mad For Real at Tate Modern on January 18, 2020. Mad For Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi) will present their banner project commissioned by Venice Agendas to mark the new decade.

In the giant public space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, they will lay down large-scale hand-written sheets in Chinese communicating in their own language to further their ongoing critique of the exclusionary nature of the institutional art world. In a climate of decolonisation of art education and the institution, their simple performative act aims to highlight certain blind-spots that continue to affect the non-Western world, playing with boundaries of understanding and recognising the linguistic barriers that limit cross-cultural communication. By presenting a work for an exclusively Chinese-language readership, Mad For Real circumscribes access by mainstream UK audiences thus diverting the Venice Agendas question, ‘What is the Value of Art?’ towards the question of language, power and ownership in the art world. The idea of ‘the conservation’ is evoked with relation to linguistic accessibility and globalisation.

Date: January 18, 2020

Time: 2.00 pm

Venue: Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.

Mad For Real at Tate Modern. Courtesy of Venice Agendas.