Introduction

Owing to Edouard Malingue Gallery's great commitment, Condo will finally come to Shanghai in July 2018. “Condo”—taken from “Condominium” (com “together” and dominium “right of ownership”, referring to a territory formally shared by different powers)—is a new format for international galleries to collaborate in exhibition-making. This inaugural edition of Condo Shanghai will include nine participating local galleries from Shanghai, which will welcome and share their spaces with thirteen international galleries, displaying major works by artists they represent alongside those of the invited galleries.

Edouard Malingue Gallery, together with two renowned German galleries, will present The Soul of the Soulless, a three-person exhibition. Esther Schipper will present a large-scale installation by the British-born artist Simon Fujiwara and König Galerie sculptures and drawings by German artist Andreas Schmitten. As the host gallery, Edouard Malingue Gallery is proud to present the works of the local Shanghainese artist He Yida in dialogue with these two excellent artists on the same platform.

Simon Fujiwara has an oeuvre that crosses multiple media, from sculpture and installation to video and painting, mining worlds as diverse as advertising and archaeology. His work reflects on the connections between the individual and the social through fictional personal histories and archaeologies.

This exhibition will show Rebekkah (2012), a work that combines sculpture and video. Fujiwara's work takes as point of departure Rebekkah, a sixteen-year-old girl who once took part in the 2011 London riots. The artist filmed her two-week-long trip to China, which was part of her “resocialisation” programme. In China, she visited a factory of flat-screen TVs and a sportswear manufacturing plant, witnessing the real production environment of some of the goods stolen by her and her partners in the riot. She also visited Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Army, and subsequently Rebekkah toured a factory where modern terracotta figures are produced. Here casts of her were made in the style of the terracotta warriors. To date, there have been over 130 terracotta-warrior-style sculptures of Rebekkah made, which are presented around the world in Fujiwara’s exhibitions. These terracotta casts of Rebekkah are products manufactured in large-scale assembly lines, the craft value and hand produced mistakes of each assembly line worker visible in the sculptures. Yet at the heart of this new production is a young British woman who engaged in the destruction of the long-solidified relations between production and occupation. Fujiwara’s work is very often inspired by real events in the real world; through his distinctive narrative and subtle logical structures, the artist explores the construction of individual and social identities.