07 Aug 2009

The 6th Kuala Lumpur Triennial: Artifice090603009794

The Kuala Lumpur Triennial Six: Artifice090603009794, opened at the Central Market Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, marks the reappearance of this venerable national Triennial.

This year's Triennial focuses on the screen and virtuality. Participating artists, theorists, curators, and programmers hail from Finland, Chechnya, Malaysia, Singapore and the US. The exhibition takes place completely in the Second Life game construct, where Finnish artist, Pascal Sobczak has scaled up and simulated the Annexe Gallery. On display is Little Chechnya, mosque designed and created by the Finland-based Chechen refugee artist, A. Law with Sobczak. The project, 'Little Chechnya' or 'Virtual Chechnya' was conceived by the Finnish conceptual installationist and filmmaker, Ryokan Kanto as a safe place for the broken families of the Chechen refugee community to meet. Other works include a film by Finn, Pupu Pau, and a performance by the Australian artist, The Quote Generator.

The Malaysian architectural consortium ANDbal is carrying out a re-mapping of the analog space of the actual Annexe in Kuala Lumpur, running parallel to its transposition in the digital environment. A long-term research project on digital goldfarming is to be developed during the succeeding two months the Triennial is on-line and afterward, by Sobacz and Malaysian venture capitalist, Mahda Fizua.

KLT6:Artifice embraces 'Actant Networks', that is social networks which include the interface of the two most influential forms of symbolic intelligence residing on earth today: carbon-based human and silicon-based computers.
KLT6 engages both of these in its representational economy, bringing together digital encoding, virtual architectonics, digital film, theoretical musings and analog performance. Another goal of the Triennial curators is to interrogate the aesthetics of Biennial/Triennial culture itself in relation to the performative theories of economics and the 'GEC'. As they put it in the exhibition programme,

'The 6th Kala Lumpur Triennial is a meta-shell game that extends exhibition culture into epidemiologies of simulation, scale, architecture, absence, and the GEC. KLT6 presumes an aesthetics founded on the collusions of market forces, securitization, (de)leveraging, exchange, clearing, speed and the screen.'

The exhibition can be viewed at the Annexe Gallery for three days, through Sunday, 9 August 2009, after which the Annexe portal closes and the Triennial remains accessible to Second Life avatars on-line until 6 October 2009 at the following coordinates: Lighthouse Group 210, 237, 22 or can be found through this link: slurl.com/secondlife/Lighthouse%20Group/210/237/22.


KLT6 is made possible by generous support in Finland by the Lehtinen Foundation, Finnish Academy of Fine Art, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, the Arts Council of Finland; in Singapore by The Substation; and in Malaysia by Lab DNA, ITrain, Sdn, Bhd, Tree Egg Communications, Valentine Willie Fine Arts, Sapura Technology, and The Annexe Gallery.

For information contact Jerome Kugan - jerome@annexegallery.com -