HOUSE OF NATIONS

2021, single-channel video, 2K, color, 5.1 sound, 28’58’’

Courtesy of the artist, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice

HE XIANGYU

The practice of He Xiangyu (1986, China) explores the impact of geopolitical and historical turbulence on individuals and communities. The artist uses documentary and fictional approaches to explore the notions of identity and survival from a cross cultural point of view, often focusing his attention on the human body and how it responds to historical and political forces.

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, House of Nations is an intimate and elusive portrait of a young Chinese man who lives in a Berlin rooming house for international students.
The video closely follows its protagonist over two years in his daily errands, social gatherings, and more private moments amid the invisibility that the urban context places upon the life of individuals. No major events happen around him. Yet a series of minor specks of dust—a lonely look in his eyes, a sense of disconnection in his body language—creep in and suggest the existential aspirations and uncertainties he is grappling with. If tactile sensations such as the warmth of a fire, the dryness of his hands when rubbed together, and the softness and harshness of a rope during a bondage session become the compass to navigate the spectrum of his psychology, the doors that recurringly open and close gesture toward those attempts at translation and transgression of the boundaries between what’s inside him versus outside.
With its cinema verité approach, the video offers a space of storytelling to all those lives that would otherwise be deemed anonymous, while exposing the paradoxes of globalization in its false aspirations of a borderless world and seamless displacements.