Palais Populaire

Works by the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei (* 1978) are currently on view in the exhibition Time Present. On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, the PalaisPopulaire will show the film for which these photographic works were made, Whose Utopia? (2006), in the Atelier of the PalaisPopulaire from September 9 – 14, 2020. To make the film, Cao Fei worked for half a year in a light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta. She set up workshops in which she invited the workers to communicate their utopian ideas and to realize them in performances at their workplace. Many of the participants shed their anonymity for the first time and staged their dreams—as a ballerina or as a rock star swinging a guitar back and forth next to gas bottles. Compelling and poetic, Whose Utopia? documents extreme cultural upheavals in China on the way to becoming the world’s most important economic superpower.