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Sifang Art Museum presents The Infallible Interior, the first presentation in China of the international touring exhibition Notes for Tomorrow, initiated by Independent Curators International (ICI). This exhibition, co-organized by Sifang Art Museum and ICI and curated by guest curator Su Wei, will be on view from June 25 to September 5, 2021.

Notes for Tomorrow is an exhibition conceived by ICI, featuring artworks selected by 30 curators based in 25 countries around the world to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this cultural moment of transition, each work is a source of inspiration from the recent past and a guiding perspective for the future. The exhibition addresses art’s potential in the construction of collective memory in a global era. We learn the importance of sustaining and sharing different forms of knowledge, prompting us to re-imagine our conceptions of the future.

The global epidemic and the constant unprecedented emergencies have suddenly awakened us to the fact that every territory is becoming central. The center implies urgency, convergence and action. Now, countless new centers are dashing global hierarchies and their discourse. In the meantime, imaginary borders are also giving way: the divide between East and West, the discursive borders between the global and the local, as well as the limits that chart the boundary of institutions and any like borders that mark our socio-political identities. They’ve invariably failed us.

By saying that borders are giving way and everywhere in the world can be its own center, it also means that innumerable “interiors” are happening anew in new ways. They either revolutionize and metamorphosize, or deepen into further corruption. They can turn into impenetrable hard rocks that resist all challenges, or into single islands separated from one another. These “interiors” create new problems for globalism and its inherent dialogicality. The interior is no longer a zone where the communication between heterogeneous cultures is blocked. Rather, it becomes the center of all communication and the hub all linguistic inaccessibility. In today's moment of re-division, we have to confront again these long latent questions about interior and exterior, with the hope that a language that could eventually speak about the lobal and the local explicitly and implicitly, can be created.

At this particular time in history, some art practitioners are placed in a situation where they are briefly disconnected from the art system and simultaneously thrown into an upside-down world of life due to the continued closure and social distance restrictions. As a result of the total change in the mode of closure and communication, they look inside the cultural system in which they live. Once again, the system and its practices are put on trial. In this everlasting confrontation, the domain of human, the imaginary of freedom and community, will also emerge once again. This accomplishes a particular state of work.

This exhibition brings together the work of 40 artists from around the world that are the product of this particular state of work. Their work cannot be only covered by the local nature that is the

opposite of secularized globalism. In the exhibition, we attempt to address the precarious issue of exterior and interior conflict in contemporary culture today by creating a context of "flow of interiors" that connects heterogeneous artistic practices confronting existing institutions. To what extent is the inwardness of a particular historical moment can be shared, and in what sense do their imaginings of historical residues and future institutions form a common call? On the other hand, the exhibition also attempts to create a dialogue between artistic practices from China and the other, a dialogue that provides us with texts to consider in order to identify the multiplicity of China and its meanings, and to confront the linguistic dilemmas that continue from the middle of the last century.

Notes for Tomorrow is a traveling exhibition organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) and initiated by Frances Wu Giarratano, Becky Nahom, Renaud Proch, and Monica Terrero. The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, VIA Art Fund, and ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.

The presentation at Sifang Art Museum has received additional support provided by Nanjing Pukou Culture & Tourism Development Group, Nanjing Foshou Lake Architecture & Art Development Limited and Sifang Cultural Group.