The 3rd Xinjiang International Arts Biennale is finally open! Revolving around the them of “Harmonious Symbiosis”, the latest edition of the biennale sets out from the region’s unique geographic and cultural landscape, further investigate its historical and artistic ecology, and looks into Xinjiang’s interconnections with other civilisations in Central Asia and beyond.
Rossi & Rossi is pleased to have three of our artists participate in the biennale: Rasheed Araeen, Erbossyn Meldibekov and Naiza Khan.
With the Homecoming (2012) series, Araeen incorporate the names of great thinkers of the golden age of Arab/Muslim civilisation (800–1200) rendered in a highly stylised Arabic script. In these paintings, Araeen demonstrates a new engagement with geometry as an 'Islamic' as well as universal form, while simultaneously furthering his longstanding affiliation with minimalism.
In the artwork Brand (2015), Meldibekov delves into the symbolic and arbitrary quality of value systems. The work also examines our conceptual and transcultural associations with numbers. Drawing inspiration from various sources – including a meeting with a former tattooed Holocaust survivor and an ongoing interest in the work of Fluxus artist On Kawara’s use of numbers and dates – Meldibekov investigates the process of numbering as a process of documenting historical recording
Premiered in the inaugural Pakistan pavilion in the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019, Naiza Khan’s Sticky Rice and Other Stories (2019) stems from a curious article about the cultivation of sticky
rice in the fertile plains of the Punjab province. Even though the majority of the population in Pakistan are rice-eaters, their staple remains to be basmati rice. Intrigued, Khan embarked on a journey to interview the fishermen, craftsmen of boat models and vendors of telescopes to understand the connections, old and new, in the region: age-old trade routes, the optics of visuality, production and consumption.
