Fei Xu

Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River* was an exhibition, running from 11th May - 16th July 2022, a public programme, which took place on 13th and 14th May, and an accompanying publication, at LUX, London.

The exhibition and programme called upon artists to expand the public’s horizons of temporal divides of past, present and future. Arising from the urgency of the global pandemic which has caused us to question the dominance of linear time, the artists investigated different subjectivities of time through moving image, live performance, workshops and text. The film-based exhibition was dedicated to the British Kenyan artist and activist, Grace Ndiritu (b.1982), whose practice is deeply concerned with our contemporary world, seeing it through the twin lenses of healing and spirituality, by finding alternative ways of living. Her archive of over forty 'hand-crafted' videos; post-hippie, pop-abstraction collages and shamanic performances reflect her alternative ways of looking and seeing the world through spiritual practice.

Inviting audiences to immerse themselves in Ndiritu’s two films: “A Week in the News: 7 Places We Think We Know, 7 News Stories We Think We Understand” (2010) and “Black Beauty” (2021), the exhibition reflected the artist’s explorations of “deep time”. The two works stood in dialogue with each other to enable the viewers to witness a continuity and development between the artist’s ideas across eleven years. Ndiritu’s intermediary film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (2015) was screened online for the first week of the exhibition. Her films blur the lines between different time frames and explore themes of media, authorship and historical narratives, whilst expanding on notions of temporality.

Grace Ndiritu’s debut short film “Black Beauty” has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022), 32nd FIDMarseille (2022), and British Art Show 9 (2022). Most recently her work has been featured at Flat Time House (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021/2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Kunsthal Gent (2021).

*Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River’s title was derived from Borges’ theories on the fluidity of time. Borges features as a fictional protagonist in Ndiritu’s “Black Beauty”, and his notion of “An Absolute River” was inspired by Heraclitus’ “No man ever steps in the same river twice”.

In the accompanying public programme, artists Rieko Whitfield, Serena Huang and Dr Jason Allen-Paisant guided audiences through an atemporal journey. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ ideas around the mysterious nature of time, the exhibition and programme explored alternative ideas of time to deconstruct widely accepted linear narratives.

The three contributors in the live programme each deal with critical conceptions of time in their practice. Visitors to the workshop led by Rieko Whitfield reflected on past histories through non-linear writing activities and guided meditation. Serena Huang invited her participants to reimagine potential futures using found objects to create a temporary work of theatrical art. Performing a soundscape with spoken word, Dr Jason Allen-Paisant explored the ways in which sound evades temporal categorisation and affects us differently to visual representations. The audience was invited to contemplate an unfinished past and imagine futures beyond linear time. The accompanying publication “Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River” offered different perspectives of temporality, and gave audiences opportunities to interact with these themes in a tangible and enduring way.

Fei Xu is a London and Shanghai based curator and artist whose interests lies in contemporary site-specific practice, alternative spaces, artist-run initiatives and socially engaged practice.

Fei holds a degree in MA contemporary art practice at the Royal College of Art in London. The accelerating gentrification and urbanization in China and around the globe has led Fei to interrogate the criticality of site-specific interventions as her research topic for her dissertation “The Politics of Context: Site-orientated Interventions beyond the White Cube”, in which she argues and critically evaluates that their ability to promote social change and/or to reflect on socio-political issues is inevitably conditioned and often compelled by their material and social contexts.

Fei has recently completed her graduate project “Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River” in May 2022 which consists of a solo exhibition of the British Kenyan artist and film maker Grace Ndiritu, a series of live programmes by visiting contributors as well as a publication co-produced by the curators and the artists. The project took place at Lux, a not-for-profit arts agency situated in London that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices. Since May 2022, Fei has been working on a project called SPACE ART DAO as the assistant curator. The project explores and connects the notions of meta-universe and the actual universe through inviting artists and the general public in China to record their digital artworks on the blockchain and launch them into space via satellite in the current pandemic time of isolation and immobility.

In a world heightened by the anxiety and trauma caused by the global pandemic and the political turmoil, Fei is hoping to situate her future practice in this particular context, focusing on contemporary art’s dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by these global and national crises.