Tentacular Festival. Shu Lea Chang & Vicente Matallana

We are typically taught to fear the extreme, but what if we learned to embrace it? What insights and inspiration can we glean from cultivating a love of that which exists at the fringes of mainstream society? Pioneering net artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang (TW) has spent her thirty-plus year career investigating power, race relations and sexual politics through the lens of disenfranchised and marginalized groups such as migrant, incarcerated, and trans communities. Cheang will trace her long-standing interest in love and sex through her science fiction films, video installations and browser-based artworks, tackling pornography, gender fluidity and “viral love” in feature films like I.K.U. and Fluido, as well as her recent installation 3x3x6, created for the Taiwanese Pavillion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, filmmaker, networker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film and mobile web serial. As a net art pioneer, her project BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.  From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post net-crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works. This year, she is representing Taiwan with a solo exhibition 3x3x6 at Venice Biennale 2019.   

Vicente Matallana is the director of the BEEP Electronic Art Collection, as well as the founder and director of LaAgencia, an independent new media art company created in 1998 in Madrid. LaAgencia is engaged in programs and projects focused on new media art as an alternative paradigm of research and knowledge. Matallana is also a teacher and lecturer and regularly publishes articles and sits on international juries, seminars and committees for new media art.  With Joasia Krysa, he has been the co-director of the Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus.