Concept  

STATION was developed in response to a brief created in collaboration with Art Monthly, the UK’s leading magazine of contemporary visual art, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

STATION is a speculative and generative structure that aims to create the conditions for a multiplicity of ways of knowing to emerge and co-exist. Through performance, discussions and listening, STATION is proposed as a porous, unstable structure that seeks to challenge hegemonic understandings of meaning and value.

The artists we have invited are Raheel Khan and Lynn Lu, whose practices approach meaning as something produced collectively through staging encounters, exchange and participation and that challenge conventions of meaning-making and interpretation. STATION operates beyond ocularcentrism and passive viewership, through participatory performance, podcasting and deep listening. 

The activations underline the proposition of STATION as a flexible infrastructure that tries to reclaim and redistribute the right to articulate and disseminate how meanings are generated. The artists docking at STATION are not merely contributors of fixed knowledge; the encounters they offer, alongside the participatory podcast programme Dispatch, together absorb randomness and uncertainties from external participants. By continuously being activated through new encounters, STATION aims to create small ruptures within the institution’s closed surface, through which audiences and practitioners mutually catalyse and produce new knowledge. 

Our title is a nod to Utopia Station, a discursive unit at the 2003 Venice Biennale, which we see as an intervention that highlighted the embrace of participation and discursivity. Despite its aspirations, it remained fully embedded within the very institutional logics it sought to question at the time. This contradiction, articulated by Paul O’Neill in Art Monthly (issue 272), resonates with our present concern that curatorial and discursive platforms perpetuate Western conceptions of art, despite their claims of engaging with non-Western perspectives. 

STATION does not claim to escape hegemonic power dynamics but tries to create a circulation that docking practitioners and external participants can mutually influence and generate new ways of knowing. Together, they turn STATION into an outward-facing channel within the institutional bubble. 




STATION was developed in response to a brief created in collaboration with Art Monthly, the UK's leading magazine of contemporary visual art, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

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Curated by Hannah Hornby, Nara Jung, Orphée Kashala, Jun Haeng Lee, Jiaao Song, Nicole Yip