The Global Contemporary. Gespräch mit Will Kwan

I make artworks in order to understand how cultural and political authority is produced and regulated through diverse visual practices. I work with photography, video, and installation to stage counter-narratives that question the iconography, vocabulary, material culture, and protocols of dominant ideologies. In the prevailing contemporary belief system, I take a critical interest in globalization. I examine the way that globalized entities perpetuate myths of a synchronized, impartial, and frictionless world-space while marginalizing the exclusions, exceptions, and contradictions that haunt any attempt at establishing a global picture. My approach is to contaminate material that claims to be universal with traces of historical context, cultural perspective, and socio-economic reality. As a result, my artistic research also documents histories of encounters between cultural identities at the level of trade, urbanism, and warfare.