On View: November 13-December 10
The Video Viewing Room series presents recent video works and archival recordings. This online initiative revives The Kitchen's longstanding Video Viewing Room—a dedicated space within our buildings from 1975 through the early 1990s.
This Video Viewing Room presents a recent, single-channel video by Swiss artist Jiajia Zhang. Filmed in high-traffic zones in Milan and Rome, Zhang’s handheld footage zooms in on details of urban planning as well as the herd instincts on display in the crush of mediatized tourism and commerce. Alongside this, two textual elements unfurl simultaneously: the on-screen text culls from corporate and academic writing related to the social media influencer today, while the voiceover reads excerpts of Gertrude Stein’s 1936 essay "What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them?” The recitation of Stein’s slippery prose about malleable concepts such as identity, history, and time jockeys against and bleeds into the more familiar descriptors of the role of the content creator and their new, nebulous forms of creative labor and self-surveillance.
Jiajia Zhang: Social Gifts (2023) is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.
BIO
Jiajia Zhang works across different digital media, video, and photography, which she presents in spatial installations. Based in Zürich, she studied architecture at ETH, Zürich; photography at the International Center of Photography, NY; and art at ZhDK in Zürich. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at Istituto Svizzero, Milan; Giorno Poetry Systems NY; Kunsthaus St.Gallen; Fluentum Berlin; Swiss Art Awards, Basel; FriArt, Fribourg; Kunsthaus Glarus; and Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris, among others.
Funding Credits
Video Viewing Room was initiated with the support of the NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund in The New York Community Trust; annual grants from Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation and Howard Gilman Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.