ants and butterflies

mini-shop

by Jia - Ausstellungsprojekt in der Humboldt-Box

0
  • IMG_1983
  • new_CP0A3913
  • IMG_2412
  • new_CP0A3920
  • IMG_2275
  • new_CP0A3933

Website: mini-shop.org

For children, especially children in China, mini-shops are the sites of beloved experiences of a childhood that often has few joyful memories to rival it. Most often is wondrous place between the worlds of school and home. I know this from my own experience when my parents left me to be raised by my grandparents in the countryside. The mini-shop is the first stop after school, a place we children could become masters of our own time, free of authority and obligation—a place where wonderful snacks, candy, or toys present themselves, often at prices that even poor children occasionally can afford, especially if they share.

When I first made Mini-shop as an art installation after having spent time together with the Yi orphans of Liangshan, it was also because it seemed clear to me that, for the museum-going public, the experience of visiting an exhibition in a space for viewing art entails many attributes that parallel the Chinese schoolchild’s visit to a mini-shop. The exhibition space is, for the adult, a place to experience the imagination and aesthetic pleasures, outside or between the more “real” sites—often fraught with obligation—of work and home.

As installation, the Mini-shop makes explicit this parallel in a way that would transforms the receiver into the child at the mini-shop, albeit with objects of desire the adult is more likely to be able to apprehend.

Since nothing is for sale, and neither can the practice of the Mini-shop be barter, a word whose very etymology roots it in deception for personal advantage, instead Mini-shop transfigures the site of commoditized monetary exchange transactions into an empathic mirror that mutually reflects two disparate geographies, cultures, ages, and desires.

Rather than a representation, Mini-shop aspires to serve as a communicative medium of this empathy through both literal and symbolic exchange rooted in love—which, after all, is what the children really most desire, and what they most need.

— 嘉 Jia

Ausstellung
„VORSICHT KINDER! geliebt, geschützt, gefährdet“

07. Juli — 14. Januar 2018
Jul bis Nov: 10–19 Uhr, Dez bis Jan: 10–18 Uhr

Humboldt-Box
Eintritt frei, kostenlose Führungen Fr/Sa/So 15h

Anhand von rund 160 ausgewählten Objekten aus Berliner Sammlungen sowie aktuellen künstlerischen Arbeiten beleuchtet die Ausstellung schlaglichtartig unterschiedliche Aspekte des Schutzes von Kindern. Dabei begegnen sich die Perspektiven aus der Antikensammlung, dem Ethnologischen Museum, dem Museum Europäischer Kulturen und dem Museum für Asiatische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin sowie aus dem Botanischen Garten und Botanischen Museum Berlin und der Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin.

„VORSICHT KINDER! geliebt, geschützt, gefährdet“ ist die zweite Ausstellung des Humboldt Forums unter der Gründungsintendanz von Neil MacGregor, Hermann Parzinger und Horst Bredekamp. Sie steht exemplarisch für die kooperative Herangehensweise des Humboldt Forums und zeigt, welche Ideen und Themen im künftigen Humboldt Forum von zentraler Bedeutung sein werden: Kultur, Natur, Migration, Religion und Globalisierung. Das Humboldt Forum vermittelt neues Wissen disziplinübergreifend und durch aktive Mitwirkung. Zusätzlich werden die Inhalte der Ausstellung über Diskussionen, Vorträge, Führungen und Workshops in verschiedenen Sprachen vertieft.