In SCREENS ARE PUBLIC TABLETS ARE PRIVATE, Schröder presents a series of works inside and outside the CEAC exhibition space. The starting point of this exhibition is documentation. Since the 1960’s, film and photography have enabled art from outside to move into the exhibition space. Monumental sculptures, land art and performative gestures could be recorded and represented in galleries. More recently, documentation is used to bring politics, social contexts and local histories into art practices. As Boris Groys writes, documentation is a way of capturing life. The living artistic process is deferred, but made accessible through screens, images and text.

Paintings can be seen as tradable pieces of wall. Similarly, the documenting and archiving of artistic gestures economizes them. This form of documentation is often the main and sometimes even the only outcome of artistic production. As a result, artists rely more and more on digital documentation in relation to visibility, funding bodies and the circulation of their work.

Over the last four months, Schröder investigated various documentary practices in and around Xiamen. This involved bringing temporary work from outside to inside, the ongoing production and circulation of images by the local tourist industry, moving documentation itself in and out of the gallery space, interventions in other people’s image making and lastly, the projection of narratives onto daily life. Documentation is never neutral. It always transforms, frames, politicizes, subverts or deceives.

SCREENS ARE PUBLIC TABLETS ARE PRIVATE is made possible with the generous support of:
Amsterdam Fund for the Arts
Stichting Stokroos
The Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou

The artist would like to thank:
May Lee and Ineke Gudmundsson of the CEAC, Frank Hitman of www.zoubatours.com, Loafe 咯肥, Kang You Teng, mr. Zhu, Hyeisoo Kim, Morgan Wong and Manuel-Angel Macia.

Gallery