EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

Para Site and Kunsthall Trondheim are delighted to present A beast, a god, and a line in Trondheim, Norway. Curated by Cosmin Costinas, this expansive travelling exhibition is woven through the connections and circulations of ideas and forms across a geography commonly called Asia-Pacific. Arbitrary as any mapping, not least in contemporary art exhibitions, it could also be known by several other definitions, which the exhibition explores and untangles. The stories in A beast, a god, and a line journey on routes going back to several historical eras, starting from the early Austronesian world that has woven a maritime universe surpassed in scale only by European colonialism and is taken as the speculative and approximate geographical perimeter of this exhibition. Overlapping and sometimes conflicting or barely discernible beneath the strident layers of contemporaneity and the modern waves of destruction, these fluid worlds are still the pillars of a region that is going through a process of replacing its colonial cartographic coordinates, a process this exhibition proudly serves.

The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Dhaka Art Summit, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. It was first shown at Dhaka Art Summit in February 2018 and subsequently at Para Site, March-May 2018; TS1 at Pyinsa Rasa Art Space at the Secretariat & Myanm/art Gallery in Yangon, Myanmar in June 2018; and at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, July-October, 2018. The exhibition will be travelling to MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand in early 2020. The iteration in Trondheim is organised by Kunsthall Trondheim and Para Site, Hong Kong.

Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, discursive and educational projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.