Elision / Furen Dai
Elision
Furen Dai
Tuesday April 29 // 6:00 – 9:00pm
C/ Creu dels Molers, 15. BCN
After her two-month residency at Homesession, the artist Furen Dai, presents her exhibition ‘Elision’.
The city exists twice: as a concept from above, and as a lived experience from within. Furen Dai’s photographs explore this dialectical relation between vertical vision and horizontal wandering, reflecting Michel de Certeau’s understanding of city navigation. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,”[1] he wrote.
Comprehending the city requires both perspectives—elevated views presenting it as readable text and street-level observations capturing transformative practices. Like a gardener who envisions from a temporal and spatial distance while engaging directly with the sensory experience and the immediate surroundings, this tension creates a dual condition: systematic yet random, visible yet concealed—a perpetual negotiation where the city, like poems, is defined equally by the gaps and filled areas.
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Furen Dai (b. Changsha, China) is an artist whose work explores the origins of language and how categorization structures and systems function within a broader social and political context. Anchored in sculpture, her practice challenges these very notions and expands across film, publishing, drawing, fresco painting and photography, taking into account the exploration of material, display, lighting, architecture, and text.
Her work has been recently exhibited and commissioned at Broodthaers Society of America, New England Triennial, Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, National Art Center, Tokyo, and Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. Dai has received fellowships at MacDowell, Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, International Studio and Curatorial Programs, and Art OMI. Her work has been featured in Artforum, LEAP Magazine, The New York Review, Boston Globe, and Boston Art Review. She has contributed writing to Asia Art Archive and Best!: Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts published by Paper Monument.
