天堂视频 Professor and art historian curates show for the Suzhou Lake Jinji Biennale

Taking place in east China鈥檚 Jiangsu Province, the sixth Suzhou Jinji Lake Biennale comprises three thematic exhibitions, with over 2000 works on display from artists around the world, including paintings by Amikam Toren, one of the UK鈥檚 leading conceptual artists.

Professor Phillip Lindley has been invited to curate in the International Contemporary Art part of the show, and proposed an exhibition called ‘Amikam Toren: Of The Times’, having recently of Amikam’s works at 天堂视频.

He selected 12 large paintings and 6 associated drawings from a series called ‘Of The Times’, which date between 1983 and 1996. To paint each canvas, the artist pulverised a single issue of The Timesnewspaper.  All that he preserved was part of the masthead and date, with a fragment of the headline from that day. He ground up the rest of the newspaper, to use it as pigment, mixed it with PVA as the medium and painted it onto a large canvas in the form of a single letter in a unique letterform. 

Speaking of the works, Professor Lindley explains that:

“Sometimes, when we look back at artworks, their significance for us is even greater than when they were first produced. From today’s perspective, the Of The Times paintings have gained additional meaning, enhancing their status as landmark works.  For, during the years Toren produced them, the world was shifting from an analogue print culture into a digital one.”

He continues to say:

“The world-wide-web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee, inaugurated a wholly new Information Age from 1991 onwards. Today, billions of people interact on the Internet and derive their news from it, not from printed newspapers. Now, the Of The Times paintings can be seen as emblematically representing a watershed in world history: the short period during which a fundamental transition was made from the analogue print technology of the past to the modern, digital world.”

A fully illustrated catalogue with installation photographs has been produced by Professor Lindley and will be available through the university library in June.

It has also been translated into Mandarin Chinese by School of Design and Creative Arts PhD student, Lulu Ao, and current MA Graphic Design and Visualisation student, Xiaotong Sun, alongside Professor Lindley’s daughter, Elizabeth, who recently graduated in East Asian studies from Cambridge.

For this exhibition, Amikam personally flew out to install the works which are available to view until the 25 June 2023.