Spoken word

Mad For Real (Cai Yuan & Jian Ju Xi) and poet Yang Lian create a live event incorporating performance, poetry and prose in response to the current exhibition, Counterpoints.

Mad for Real started working as a performance duo in the late nineties and have collaborated on a number of ‘artistic interventions’ in museums and gallery spaces including the infamous Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize Exhibition. Their performance has taken place as a gesture calling to mind notorious artists of earlier radical art movements but the historical, linguistic and political context of their practice is often related specifically to their origins: China.

Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tian’anmen massacre. Since that time, he has continued to write and speak out as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture. His thoughtful and inspired works have been called “one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature”.

Yang Lian will open with selected poems. 30 minutes. Cai Yuan, and Jian Ju Xi, Mad For Real will perform alternate readings from Marx’s, The Communist Manifesto (Cai Yuan) and The Bible (Jian Ju Xi). 45 minutes.

Organised by Adelaide Bannerman.