Archive
Parallel Vienna 2018
For her aptly titled video installation “Siren”, Chinese artist Silin Liu invited people on the streets to lip-synch the sound of a police siren together. The effect is both hilarious and – with a nerve-racking sound verging on pure terror – highly unsettling at the same time. In the short video clips filmed with mobile phone camera and selfie-stick, the ordinary people Liu encounters, a mother breastfeeding her child, a hotel clerk and a farmer among them, seem strangely possessed, forming a disquietingly synchronized community which confronts the excluded viewer.
Silin Liu, born 1990, also known as Céline Liu, is a female Chinese artist, based in Beijing. A graduate from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, Beijing, with a major in Photography, she is equally at home in the gallery space and the online realm, her works often exploring the status of the image in a contemporary networked society. Her series “I’m everywhere” in which she photoshopped herself into 20th Century history, posing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Lady Di, Simone de Beauvoir or Winston Churchill, won her the Jimei X Arles Discovery Award in 2016 and was exhibited at Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles the following year. OstLicht Gallery presents her work in Vienna for the first time.
