Alan Bogana | 2020 Residency
Mainland China | Visual Arts
May to July 2020, Home Not Alone Residency and Jan. 10-Mar. 9, 2022 in China — Visual Arts
Nationality: Switzerland
Residency location: (Home Residency) Shanghai; Hong Kong
Partner organization: Chronus Art Center; 1a Space
Alan Bogana, born in 1979, currently lives and works in Geneva.
Bogana’s art practice involves sculpture, time-based media and holography, and his works are often presented in the form of installations. His artistic research reflects on the mediating role that imaging technologies and popular science play in our understanding of reality, by colonizing our imagination and by expanding and distorting our perceptions. Recurring topics in his works are the real and speculative behavior of light as well as the notion of what he calls the digital organic. Many of his works enquire on the extended mimesis of nature that digital technologies generate and visualize.
Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include: HeK, Basel (2020); Smena Art Center, Kazan (2019); Bally Headquarter, Milan (2019); Mineralogy Museum Mines, Paris (2018); La Rada, Locarno (2017); OnOff, Winterthur (2016); Kunsthaus, Langenthal (2015); Hard Hat, Geneva (2013); Blank Projects, Cape Town (2011). Bogana has been awarded with the Bally Artist Award in 2018 and the Pax Art Award in 2019.
He has been artist-in-residence at Pro Helvetia Johannesburg (2011), Swiss Institute in Rome (2013-14), Summer Academy Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern (2014), Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2014), Landis & Gyr Foundation in Zug (2015), Djerassi Residence Program in San Francisco (2018), and Simetria residency program at CERN in Geneva, and at ESO-ALMA astronomical observatories in Chile (2019).
During his residency in China, Bogana will research on a series of topics, which he relates to the notion of “utopian imagination” and on issues related to the downsides of the technological development. More specifically, he will research on: the recent developments of the Chinese space program, its public impact on people’s imagination and hopes, the spreading of indoor skydiving culture, light pollution generated by the light architecture, people’s personal relationship to the starry sky as well as the occurrence of electrical blackouts and electricity shortages during the last decades. The research on these topics will interweave and converge into a series of new works.
