Ex-ante: Chia-Wei Su in Conversation with Fiona Amundsen

Overview

Recently the Collins dictionary crowned 'fake news' as 2017's word of the year. It was initially popularised as the current US President Donald Trump's favourite comeback for any allegations, speculations, questions or general statements of scientific fact. It is to 2017 as Taylor Swift's 'I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative' is to 2016.

Ex-ante is an art exhibition that both reacts to and shrugs at the current zeitgeist of post-truth. As beautifully put by the gallery themselves, "Ex-ante focuses on the role of images in our world, arguing that we need not speak to truth — either 'post' or 'pre'— nor the image perform it. Instead, the exhibition advocates for the imaginative and speculative role of the image when it is set to work on the present. It tries to understand how we might be complicit in the production of our own realities, truths, or futures. How not to forecast, but to see, before the event?"

As part of the program, Ex-ante are hosting a conversation between Chia-Wei Hsu and Fiona Amundsen. Hsu's internationally renowned work focuses on the unrecorded parts of Asian Cold War history, merging reality and illusion to create an alternative take on events. Amundsen draws inspiration from memory, specifically "the question of who gets the right to remember, along with what it means to remember ethically, and what this might look like."