June 23 – July 1, 2007
various locations | Beijing, CN

art direction ::  Beatrice LEANZA & Pauline DOUTRELUINGNE
main organizers :: BAO Atelier & Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing
in collaboration with: Soho China, Ltd., 86/33 Link, Theatre in Motion, Chaos Projects
supporting institutions :: CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts), Beijing Film Academy, Goethe Institute Peking, Austrian Cultural Forum, Norwegian Office of Foreign Affairs, Embassy of Belgium in China, Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations (Mexico), Icelandic Art Center
sponsored by :: MinSheng Bank, Barco, Boloni Group, Intelligent Alternative
media partners :: Modern Media, Domus China, Time Out Beijing, Danwei.org, City Pictorial, City Weekend, Vision, Art&Design China

An experimental urban platform unfolding over the course of nine days, it takes as its area of investigation the interconnection between visual production and contemporary urban culture with a focus on video art and its multidisciplinary accounts. Conceived as a continuous narrative, the event moved every day into a new location within different areas of Beijing city, networked through public and private institutions, commercial and educational spaces including universities, galleries and art venues.

It featured an international program of both exhibitions and public programs such as talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances bridging perspectives from installation, short film, documentary, animation, performance and music, sound art, architecture and design.

Borderline‘s structure included three overarching sections: 2 thematic exhibitions, 6 days of Mobile Lab and night events. Full content on all events can be viewed at www.borderlinefestival.org.

THE MOBILE LAB | 3 Sub-Containers For 1 Discursive Environment

June 2007

Rendering of the Mobile Lab by Neville MARS for Dynamic City Foundation

The Mobile Lab is a truck unit provided with a large projection screen which becomes a site for artistic intervention delivered to/through the city while moving through 3 locations over 6 days (2 days at each stop). It is a site for performances/artists’ presentations, open talks, lectures and public screenings. The vehicle of the Mobile Lab represents a small-scale mode of public intervention, adaptive to the city’s artistic infrastructure, institutional system and urban representations. It strategically captures while exposing the possibility of expedience as a collective form of cultural action. It compresses in camped actions and visual arrays yet not invading the public domain, but conforming to its large scale, flowing nature, fragmented circulation of community-performances and sporadic self-organizational practices. This projects attempts at introducing alternative ways for communicating and producing discourse, lifting the intellectual voice of Beijing ‘s cultural middle-field players against the stagnant market language of art tycoons. By engaging the public and the content makers in a different form of collective participation consistent with the local reality we are producing a cultural statement and visionary yet hopeful proposition to the local community by going against its unequal and sometimes uncommunicative methods of knowledge transfer. The programs and events featured in the Mobile Lab will be articulated into 3 main subject-containers, aimed at illustrating within a multidisciplinary context how issues pertinent to local artistic and philosophical analysis, spatial practice and the media performance, can inform about a singular regime of vision born out of a unique urban one, and, while being confronted with the specificities of selected international practices, ultimately investigates the characteristics/possibility of new subjective orders.