Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin

More, More, More

11 November 2020 — 31 January 2021

TANK, Shanghai

TANK Shanghai presents More, More, More, a large-scale international exhibition featuring new commissions and existing artwork by 28 international artists and groups.

More, More, More is a reference to a popular disco song from the mid-’70s, released by The Andrea True Connection. It features several musical elements that epitomize the aesthetic excess of early electronic dance music, such as verbal innuendo, a consistent “four on the floor” beat, lush studio strings, and, especially, excessive repetition.

The use of repetition in music—like in all media— changes our perception of the thing repeated. If excessively repeated, a familiar word may sound like gibberish, gain a double meaning, or transform into a different kind of speech act. [For example, when the word “more” is sung or emphasized repeatedly in English, it sounds more like the Chinese pronunciation of “mo, mo, mo,” meaning “touch, touch, touch!”] Through this process, the “meaning” of a word breaks down. It loses its conventional function as a fixed signifier for something else, becoming a more sensuous kind of object, lying somewhere between locution and music, symbol and noise, or the mind and the mouth.

This exhibition embraces a similar attitude of sensorial play, extra-linguistic excess, and mutable meaning as the old hit song from the 1970s. Working with the textures of a text, the sonority of language, the traces in a translation, or even the relationship between the visible and the microbial, More, More, More features art that works to open the field of artistic experience to a diversity of phenomena. In ways large and small, the artists and collectives in this exhibition break from the grim persistence of philosophical traditions that fuse knowledge with sight, allowing for new possible meanings, re-affixed to the body, to emerge.

Through different modes of making, the artists in this exhibition direct our attention to the methods of embodiment that facilitate even the most normalized techniques of knowledge production (such as reading a map or watching a TED Talk on YouTube). Many also illuminate the divergences between the experience of bodies on the one hand and the words and images used to give a body its identity on the other. Collectively and individually, the artworks in More, More, More possess a dynamic potential through which new orientations to knowledge can be sensed-- which, as art audiences, we should be inclined to emulate.

More, More, More is curated by Passing Fancy (X Zhu-Nowell and Frederick Nowell) with the support of Elise Armani and organized by TANK Shanghai.

Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.

With her friend and collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to describe the growing atomisation of individuals and the shifting ground of urban planning, aesthetics, and media, and their impact on everyday life in the post-oil Persian Gulf. Her cinematic artist’s videos are fuelled by the combination of critical rigour with an affective charge in their explorations of language, imperialism, and counter-histories – a deep investigation and dramatisation of the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental present.

Al-Maria’s debut exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2016, attends to the Gulf’s embrace of consumerism. Black Friday features primarily of shots of empty shopping centres in Doha. An unseen narrator declares the mall as the place “where the glamorous heart of evil is born”, a place of entrapment and confusion complete with faces blurred beyond recognition and bodies collapsed on the floor.

Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2018, resulting in her exhibition BCE comprising of films, performances and readings, including her first collaboration with the artist Sin Wai Kin. Her most recent collection of essays and writings, Sad Sack, was published by Book Works in 2019.

In 2021, Al-Maria debuted a new video work, Tender Point Ruin, at the Luma Foundation, Arles. The sequel and concluding chapter to a trilogy of videos that began with Beast Type Song, Tate Britain, 2019, Tiger Strike Red, is currently on show at Applied Arts Pavilion as part of The Milk Of Dreams | 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. In 2023, Al-Maria presented the trilogy of videos together for the first time in the a solo exhibition, Not My Bag, at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

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