[virtual]

Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere: A Screening and Conversation
October 28, 2020, 1:00 pm
at University Galleries of Illinois State University

Join us on Wednesday, October 28 for a screening of Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere, a collaboration by artists Jen Bervin (Nets) and Charlotte Lagarde, and a discussion with the artists.

The screening will be introduced by exhibition curator Kendra Paitz, Director and Chief Curator at University Galleries, and followed by a conversation moderated by Jennifer Yee, Associate Director, Public Programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

This free digital program will be available to watch on Vimeo from 1pm on October 28 until 12:30 a.m. EST on October 29.
Advance registration is required here.

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This program is presented by University Galleries of Illinois State University, and organized in conjunction with Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020), the first survey of Jen Bervin’s work.

Shift Rotate Reflect premieres Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere(2016–2020), Jen Bervin’s collaboration with filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde. The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji tu.” Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in any direction to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations. Bervin and Lagarde created a rotation of four projected videos featuring commentary from eight Chinese women: an algorithmic game theorist, calligrapher, art researcher, astrophysicist, artist, novelist, and literary scholars. Bervin and Lagarde also partnered with a contemporary embroidery studio in Suzhou, China, to create two new renderings of the poem using a specialized double-sided silk embroidery technique on translucent silk screens. The finished embroideries and a video projection of the embroidery process are included in the installation.