Foreign Bodies is a multi-site contemporary art project, reflecting upon the notion of the ‘foreign’ in relation to prevailing attitudes in the UK.
Organised by students on the MA Curation course at University of Exeter, Foreign Bodies explores the experience of being on the margins and what it feels like to be an outsider in a dominant cultural context.
As well as considering issues of diversity and inclusion in relation to gender, health, sexuality, and race, Foreign Bodies considers what it must be like to be ‘more than human’ in an urban setting, and how our unchecked consumerism has polluted the world’s oceans. The project also invites alternative modes of thinking, beyond traditional Western divisions of nature and culture, such as the esoteric practices of magic and divination.
Seeing Double
Seeing Double features the practice of artists, Hester Yang and Samuel Zhang. By exploring the impact on personal identity and the process of ‘seeing double’ when living in a second culture, this exhibition is committed to showing the pursuit of self-identity by young contemporary Chinese artists working in an international art context. When people from different backgrounds in the same country try to find a similar social identity, the community is formed. Using personal experience and others’ stories as a starting point, the two artists jointly explore the topic of ‘being foreign’ in a majority culture, both in the past and in the present.
Curator
Fei Geng
Zhouying Meng
Shijia Yan
Artist
Samuel Zhang
Hester Yang
Seeing Double features the practice of artists, Hester Yang and Samuel Zhang. By exploring the impact on personal identity and the process of ‘seeing double’ when living in a second culture, this exhibition is committed to showing the pursuit of self-identity by young contemporary Chinese artists working in an international art context. When people from different backgrounds in the same country try to find a similar social identity, the community is formed. Using personal experience and others’ stories as a starting point, the two artists jointly explore the topic of ‘being foreign’ in a majority culture, both in the past and in the present.
