Gallery Crawl

August hols are here and many of us are looking for things we can do to beat the heat. May I humbly suggest the cool spaces of 798, which are presently hosting a range of interesting shows, all of which can be seen in the full blast of air conditioning?

At UCCA, it’s both cool and dark at Feng Mengbo’s “Re-Start”, an interactive video game that has taken over the Center's nave and where you can battle it out with a range of sensors and digital projections. The culmination of Feng’s 15 year career as a video artist and a lot of fun too, this work is his take on China’s current condition.

Over at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art you can take in “Post Capital: Archive 1989-2001”, a multi-media exhibition by Barcelonan artist Daniel G Andújar. Andújar spent ten years trawling the internet to gather the some 250,000 documents that are at the base of this exhibition, which takes us from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11. The massive computer server that runs the show allows visitors to interact with this mass of material and influence its organization. The artist is committed to putting the power of technology into our hands so go along and test his commitment for yourself.

Finally, Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery brings us “Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer: The Chinese”. These Swiss photographers undertook an “epic” journey across China in 2007, covering 30,000 kilometers over seven months to take the incredible diversity of portraits on show here. You can travel from a socialite’s dressing room, to a chili farmer’s fields, to an “exotic” dancer’s cage, all without leaving the gallery’s cool walls.

So get out and see some of the world without breaking a sweat, just remember to check the gallery opening hours before you set out.