Gary Zhexi Zhang (UK, 1993)
Residency period: May-June 2024
Living and working in London, Gary Zhexi Zhang is a visual artist and writer whose work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology, and the economy. He operates individually or collaboratively with organizations using a variety of media, including installation, film, performance, writing, and teaching, and conducts research within the framework of cultural institutions and think tanks.
He recently published Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), a book of fictions, essays, and interviews about finance and time, while Dead Cat Bounce, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and has been touring in 2024. His most recent film and solo exhibition, METAMERS, was presented at EPFL Pavilions in February 2024.
He has taught as a lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA and adjunct lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he also co-founded the design studio Foreign Objects.
At La Becque, Zhexi Zhang will aim to spend time researching the foundations of a new book of essays and fictions weaving together the geopolitics, technology, and cosmology of the Anthropocene, under the concept of “metabolic governance”. From ancient cosmograms to contemporary ecological designs, these vectors interact across time and space. For Zhexi Zhang, “metabolic governance” moves away from the assumption that ecological governance will increasingly form the basis of political legitimacy and offers a lens for reading the below-mentioned interpenetrating conditions in the choreography of planetary life and death: technology as a geopolitical force, cosmology as a technological expression, and geopolitics as a process of cosmological worlding.