Disentangling Entanglement: In Memory of Intimacy, Vulnerability, and Action is an exhibition about how people come together, collaborate, part ways, and continue moving forward.
Over the past decade, amid profound shifts in social values and the conditions of everyday life and social participation in China, many have been brought together by shared concerns, struggles, or ideals into “communities.”* Many later dispersed due to social pressures, shifting relationships, or transitions in individual life stages. This exhibition understands such processes of “gathering and dispersal” as a real and common lived experience—not as a sign of failure, but as different phases within the ongoing movement of personal and collective life.
Disentangling Entanglement attends to moments that are often overlooked yet profoundly shape both individuals and their times: care and tension within community practices; vulnerability and adaptation during halted action; and the emotional and bodily experiences accumulated in everyday labor. The exhibition not only supports activists and artists in transforming these experiences into an open archive, but also fosters an evolving participatory collective creation through the ongoing workshop “Between Rootedness and Diaspora: Mapping Our Interwoven Trajectories.” Through video, sound, text, handicraft, and interactive installations, audiences are invited to slow down, observe, listen, and feel. In addition, the exhibition presents a research-based archive, “Diving into the Deep,” which traces the undercurrents of social change over the past decade, moving beneath and through individual lived experiences. “A Space to Use” opens another place for work, gathering, and process documentation, including the collaborative curatorial process. In making the exhibition, the curatorial team explored the possibilities of non-hierarchical cooperation, practices of care, and collective decision-making in a real-world context.
Disentangling Entanglement is both a retrospective gesture and a public invitation: a space that allows for pausing, looking back, and mourning, in order to reconsider how connections are formed, broken, and carried forward—and how actions that attend to both individual and collective well-being might be inherited and extended over time.
