My artistic practice has nothing to do with politics. It connects to personal historical experience within changing surroundings and society. It’s more about how I deal with the materials, objects, and surroundings in the physical and emotional dimensions.
Xinjun Zhang, Bejing/China — Visual Arts, Solitude fellow 2016
Xinjun Zhang was born in 1983 in Zhengzhou, China. He received his master’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China. In his works, he focuses on object and performance art, often using multimedia devices. Since 2012, Xinjun Zhang has hosted exhibitions and performances utilizing »unstable spaces« near his residence, including I am Close with Your Husband, boat. In 2016 he was awarded a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
In its new collective publication, Schlossghost #1, Akademie Schloss Solitude examines the ways in which politics meet artistic and aesthetic practices in contemporary societies. For this the Solitude-fellows who had residencies in 2014, 2015 and early 2016 were invited to reflect on following questions: »Would you say that your practice is political? If so, how would you describe its political dimension?« Schlossghost #1 takes over the role of the traditional yearbooks by the Akademie. Every second year since 1990 they were summarizing all the facets of the work done in Solitude and maintained as a final truth Stéphane Mallarmé’s affirmation that »the ultimate state of the world is a book«. This new publication has lost its materiality and exists only as a virtual yearbook, or one could say as the ghost of a book. WWW.SCHLOSS-GHOST.COM