Dancing on the Ceiling: Art & Zero Gravity

Dancing on the Ceiling: Art & Zero Gravity, is a major group exhibition in which contemporary artists explore—and on occasion recreate—the condition of weightlessness on earth. The exhibition will present the work of multiple national and international artists, including two newly commissioned pieces for the exhibition. Distributed throughout the public spaces at EMPAC the exhibition is itself un-tethered from the confines of the traditional gallery exhibition paradigm.

Dancing on the Ceiling will bring together artworks that use the metaphor of floating or weightlessness as an expression of the relationship of the individual to social, political or personal contexts. In addition, several of the pieces relate to lightness as akin to an agility of mind, freed of entrenched perspectives.

Occupying EMPAC’s Studio 2, Jane and Louise Wilson's four-channel video installation Stasi City is a psychological investigation of the former headquarters of the East German secret police, culminating in a moment of escape. Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of the Eye poses individual actors as if caught in a moment, defying gravity and time. The two video works that comprise William Forsythe's Antipodes I/II constitute a study of destabilizing habits of bodily movement in relation to gravity.

The artworks in the exhibition deploy helium, parabolic flight, rigging, and digital effects. They feature floating performers, an upside-down kitchen, an isolation tank and skateboarders freed from physical laws. They evoke the golden age of space exploration and the dreams of the counter-culture. Dancing on the Ceiling is a provocative convergence of time-based photography, sculpture, installation, and video.

Curated by Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Arts, the exhibition will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog including essays by Italo Calvino as well as interviews with commissioned artists Chris Doyle and Thom Kubli.