Shuang Li “Forever” at Peres Projects, Milan

Mousse Magazine, 2024年1月2日
A video projected on the bottom of a heart-shaped fountain makes up the central axis of this exhibition. Titled Heart is a Broken Record (2023), it is an impressionistic montage of videos uploaded to YouTube by fans, taken during concerts of the band My Chemical Romance throughout the last twenty years. For this video, the artist collects the brief moments before the band appears onstage, drowned by lights and screams, in effect cutting off the concert footage before it even begins. Interspersed with this concert imagery are images of spattering blood that morph to form veins, intravenous lines, sparks turning into lava, as the video continually defers and suspends the sound the audience waits eagerly to hear. Thus, at the bottom of a wishing well, the installation re-stages a concert that never happens, composed of footage of concerts that have actually taken place.