Doubtless you’ve heard the news: the museums are online. So are you, and so are the galleries, the art fairs, and the biennales too—or they will be (Biennale of Sydney, we’re looking forward to it!). Since events on the ground are few and far between, AAP’s Coronaviewing Guide surveys a week’s worth of discoveries and updates, from the online events that replaced Art Dubai and the openings at Alserkal Avenue, to artists who’ve been posting interesting content on their personal social media. Here are some interesting finds for your weekend browsing—and don’t forget to clean your phone.

Alserkal Avenue Exhibitions

There are no George Nelson benches in these virtual viewing rooms. But there are “doll house,” floorplan, and immersive viewing modes as well as a measurement tool that enable truly surreal experiences of 17 galleries at the Alserkal Avenue precinct. At Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde are Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem’s recent paintings from the series Sound of Light (2019–20), interpreting modernization through the environs of construction sites in Dubai and Jeddah. The Third Line’s vibrant, mixed-media group exhibition featuring works by Farah Al-Qasimi, Abbas Akhavan, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, and others, is also worth a click through.

Art Dubai Global Art Forum Newshour

Shumon Basar, impresario of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai’s talks program, hosts a special, self-isolating-friendly, 90-minute live broadcast in lieu of the multi-day public series. The topic of this year’s Global Art Forum, “Do You Story?,” was meant to be a look at the place of narratives in shaping who we are in the social-media age, until the accelerating coronavirus pandemic—and accompanying “narrative collapse”—began upending the previous decade’s societal order. Like a late 20th-century television news anchor, Basar interviews artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Simon Denny, and Jenna Sutela, plus other guests, reflecting on the current moment of temporal upheaval, systemic disruption, and interspecies communications of a whole new variety.  

On(line) Healing

What could be more fitting at a time like this? Art Dubai’s 2020 performance program is centered on healing—and not in the sense of the face masks, teas, and hot baths prescribed by the nascent self-care industry. Curated by Marina Fokidis, the works by the five showcased artists aim to restore the connections between the virtual and physical, humanity and nature, and between people. Hit play on Angelo Plessas’s MissionToTheNoosphere.com (2017) for a mesmerizing animation visualizing the relationship between spirituality and technology, and Imaad Majeed’s please share my self care (2020) for the artist’s musings on contemporary expressions of trauma.

Catch up on terabytes of talks held over the last couple of years at Ashkal Alwan (AA) in Beirut, the organization between the discourse-heavy Home Works festival and the artist’s intellectual bootcamp, the Home Workspace Program. On AA’s archive, you can listen to writer Heather Davis discussing “Petromateriality: The Afterlives of Oil,” from 2019; artist James T. Hong’s talk “On Nietzsche’s Second Brain”; and CCA Glasglow curator Francis McKee’s ever-relevant advice, “If God Gives You Tear Gas Make Lemonade,” plus countless more hours of panels and discussions.

Hat tip to Hyperallergic, which compiled a list of experimental artist videos that you can watch online, including the “Cabin Fever” spreadsheet started by Kate Lain, which itself contains links to hundreds of artist’s videos. One that jumped out at us was the psychedelic Alice-in-Wonderland ride taken by JooYoung Choi in their Journey to the Cosmic Womb Part 1 & 2, which is an endearingly DIY mash-up of ’70s TV-shows, animation, hand puppets, and disco. Sometimes the internet’s not so bad!

Meriem Bennani’s Lizard People

Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani, known for her absurdist videos on the social media platforms, uploaded new episodes on IGTV of quarantined lizard couples, their musical experience on the rooftop, and their encounters on their drive to the grocery. They discuss the pros and cons of working from home and the celebrity’s skills of social distancing.

Ahmet Öğüt’s made-from-home survey

The artist’s exhibition in Baku at the Yarat Centre for Contemporary Art was delayed before it could open, but in the meanwhile the Berlin-based artist has been reviewing the many artworks that were made at home—from Martha Rosler’s ur-feminist video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) to Mladen Stilinovic’s photographs of himself in bed, The Artist at Work (1978), and more recent works by Koki Tanaka, Heman Chong, and Ragnar Kjartansson.

Long before Covid-19, back in years after SARS, the duo known as Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, some of the 21st century’s earliest web artists, began making their Flash-texts set to improvised jazz animations. They were intended to exist only in the browser and they still do as videos—ever since Flash went the way of Myspace. While it’s maybe not the best time for Your J.O.B Won’t Stand a Chance!, you could instead find out how “Dialectical Sex and Gender” makes for “Happy People” in the YHCHI classic Cunnilingus in North Korea.

Now that the 2010s are definitively over, Nemesis (Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala) mull over one of the defining tropes of the era, “The Experience Economy,” in which people spent money and time on events IRL, rather than shelling out for the latest commodities (because they already had those, and so did all their friends). In this long-read essay, Segal and Kalliala propose that the idea of “umami” was the “x-factor” that explains what drove the experience economy, from David Chang’s fusion Asian cuisine to all those dimly lit cocktail bars serving “savage tiny cocktails with savory mixers.” 

There’s nothing you can do—it was all written in the stars. Find out what lies in store for this lunar month in AAP’s own Artstrology column, where assistant editor Pamela Wong weighs in on what creative and destructive forces Aries, the mighty warrior of the zodiac, has in store for us all!

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.