KUALA LUMPUR.- This year's
Triennial focuses on the screen and virtuality. Participating artists, theorists, curators, and programmers hail from Finland, Chechnya, Malaysia, Singapore and the US. The exhibition takes place completely in the Second Life game construct, where Finnish artist, Pascal Sobczak has scaled up and simulated the Annexe Gallery. On display is Little Chechnya, a mosque designed and created by the Chechen refugee artist, A. Law with Sobczak. The project, 'Little Chechnya' or 'Virtual Chechnya' was conceived by the Finnish conceptual installationist and filmmaker, Ryokan Kanto as a safe place for the broken families of the Chechen refugee community to meet. Other works include a film by Finnish installationist and filmmaker, Pupu Pau, and a performance by the Australian performance artist, The Quote Generator.
The Malaysian architectural consortium ANDbal is carrying out a re-mapping of the analog space of the actual Annexe in Kuala Lumpur, running parallel to its transposition in the digital environment. A long-term research project on digital goldfarming is to be developed during the succeeding two months the Triennial is on-line and thereafter by Sobacz and Malaysian venture capitalist, Mahda Fizua.
KLT6:Artifice embraces 'Actant Networks', that is social networks which include the interface of the two most influential forms of symbolic intelligence residing on earth today: carbon-based human and silicon-based computers. KLT6 engages both of these in its representational economy, bringing together digital encoding, virtual architectonics, digital film, theoretical musings and analog performance. Another goal of the Triennial curators is to interrogate the aesthetics of Biennial/Triennial culture itself in relation to the performative theories of economics and the 'GEC'. As they put it in the exhibition programme,
'The 6th Kuala Lumpur Triennial is a meta-shell game that extends exhibition culture into epidemiologies of simulation, scale, architecture, absence, and the GEC. KLT6 presumes an aesthetics founded on the collusions of market forces, securitization, (de)leveraging, exchange, clearing, speed and the screen.'
The exhibition can be viewed by Second Life avatars on-line until 6 October 2009 at coordinates released