Nabuqi, Board game: accidental cases (detail), 2022

"The playground facilities have the most physical interaction with the human body, maybe not the most intimate, but they can break the relationship of the mutual gaze and confrontation, and make them one and equal."

 — Nabuqi

The Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project presents an original project by Nabuqi, entitled Everything goes back to square one. For her exhibition in the Gallery 0 of the West Bund Museum, the Chinese artist Nabuqi has created a set of new works that function as an autonomous space, open for exploration, in which visitors can engage with the works in a free and singular way.

Nabuqi, Board game: accidental cases (detail), 2022

The new works on display will transform the gallery into a "playground" of utopian imagination for the first time - a site of joy and immersive self-exploration, featuring a combination of works including sculpture, installation, architecture and design. Fueled by imagination and game, Nabuqi is taking the visitors along on her artistic journey to explore the ever-moving limits between rea­lity and fiction, artwork and common object, private and public space. Thus, the key to activate the exhibition is to engage with audience, they’re more than on-lookers, they’re participants and co-creators.

Nabuqi, Board game: accidental cases (detail), 2022

Through scenography, Gallery 0 builds a childlike indoor “playground” by combining the front hall with the inner hall, in an attempt to evoke common activities of human life. The front hall brings together many elements of urban public space, such as pavilions, landscaped terraces and children's playgrounds, while inviting the public to experience the shifting relationship between body, artwork and space, gradually establishing a personalised perception of these sites. Nabuqi has designed the recreational swing as a space for meditation or solitude, to separate the front hall and the inner hall. The work in the inner hall empowers visitors to control and lead. Not only can they overlook the landscape of the city, but they can further combine and reset it to their liking.  Passing through the two spaces, from the inside to the outside, from the large to the small, the physical attributes of visitors are transformed accordingly. In this way, Nabuqi subtly blurs the lines between some established categories applied to human experience.

About the exhibition

Dates: 2022.08.12-10.23

Venue: Gallery 0, West Bund Museum

Courtesy of West Bund Museum.