At Shanghai Seminary, a new gallery in Bridgeport, it’s dark. Two videos by two contemporary collectives of entirely different cultural backgrounds are presented side-by-side in the dimmed exhibition space, installed on the same viewing plane as if their juxtaposition is just as important as the videos themselves. Qiuchen Wu (吴秋晨), the Chicago-based artist who organized the untitled exhibition, ensures guests’ comfort with a massive couch, inviting viewers to stay a while. When asked for an explanation of the works’ selection and arrangement, Wu will refer to the concise language of the newsletter and checklist, leaving the rest up to interpretation. Still, the videos’ shared interest in historical revolutionary figures and their cohabitation on the gallery wall certainly pose one significant question: What do we do with revolutionary histories? 

Through 12/23: Thu 6-10 PM, Fri-Sat 1-6 PM, or by appointment, [email protected], Shanghai Seminary, 3262 S. Morgan, shanghaiseminary.com

Wang Huiwu (2019), an eponymous biographical documentary on the Chinese social reformer, offers the possibility of memorialization. The work was professionally produced by Duan Xin of the Jiaxing Center for News and Media to be aired by China Central Television, the national television broadcaster of China. The documentary uses imaginative strategies to retell the story of Wang Huiwu’s life and influence, particularly regarding her participation in the modernization of 20th-century China. Highly produced dramatic reenactment, expert interviews, and energetic narration weave a theatrical narrative punctuated by archival photography, marking a clear effort to reimagine and memorialize Wang Huiwu for a general audience. This manner of documentary is not solely interested in historical preservation. There is a vested interest in the content’s entertainment value, necessary to captivate viewers in the project of cementing subject matter into public memory. 

Nevermade (2014), by the Alabama-based art and text undertaking Our Literal Speed, presents a hyperbolic engagement with reimagination centered around Martin Luther King Jr. The film, with the staging and color palette of a 1950s production, features two well-dressed, young, white female characters debating the future of art, theory, and the reverend himself. Their conversation is absurd, satirizing the highbrow debates of detached art historians. When one character reframes King as “the greatest artist of the 20th century,” and the civil rights movement as “the greatest exhibition of performance art ever made,” the other responds, “Have you ever read ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?’” The women conclude by deciding that art of the future will be created through this kind of reframing: rethinking rather than reproducing—the “nevermade,” a revision of the readymade. But if the (albeit hilarious) punchline of Nevermade is its ridiculousness, the question still remains: what now?

What are we to do with revolutionary histories? The comparison made with such an exceedingly unusual pairing of videos offers no clear answer, but a cautionary perspective instead. Together, the videos are an alarm—for each other and the world at large. How we preserve, activate, and share these stories matters immensely, the decisions extending far beyond the capacities of state-sponsored memorialization or art historical reimagination.