Opening words by vice
rector for research Putz-Plecko
We are honored to welcome the renowned artist
Shu Lea Cheang,
taking up elements of her actual Biennale di Venecia piece 3x3x9 in a participatory activism court – please join in! Register
as “player” under the address:
margarete.jahrmann@uni-ak.ac.atShu Lea Cheang is an artist, filmmaker, networker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation,
performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film and mobile web serial. As a net art pioneer, her
project BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She drafts
sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema.
From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post net-crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love,
bio hack in her current cycle of works. This year, she is representing Taiwan with a solo exhibition 3x3x6 at Venice Biennale
2019. Her current projects in development UNBORN0x9 (a hacking performance) and UKI (an interruptive cinema) are funded by
DICRéAM, CNC (Centre National du Cinéma) in France.
http://mauvaiscontact.infoIn her current installation 3x3x6 (on view at Venice Biennale till November 24, 2019), Shu Lea Cheang reflects upon
the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition and investigates
10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation.
The exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations
hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. For Ludic Society presentation, Cheang takes up the case of
“Regina V. Saunders” (1991) in which the defendant, Jennifer Lynne Saunders, age 18, was sentenced to six years in prison
for two counts of indecent assault. Excerpts selected from the court hearing that took place at Doncaster County Court in
1991 convene a performative re-enactment of gender play, gender fxxxking.