Poster Exhibition

September 5th will mark the third session of “TOP Events” in Shanghai. After two waves of art exhibitions and other cultural activities, “TOP Events” will present one large group show, “Poster Exhibition”, turning the building into one collective movement. This exhibition will gather almost fifty artists (including international artists), who will present more than a hundred posters.

Why posters? Why re-use this propaganda function of art? The organizers of “TOP Events” pointed out that this poster exhibition doesn’t pursue a standardized classification, nor is it an ideological propaganda event, but a collective return to an utopian memory, rethought and re-expressed in the contemporary context.

Poster is the most common propaganda media used by ideologies, it provides symbolic “positions and standards”, and holds a special place in people’s collective memory as well as individual experiences. As a traditional, nowadays declined promotion media, it is generally considered that posters have an explicit topic and a defined standpoint, possessing a standardized reproducibility. However, “Poster Exhibition” presents non-standard, individual opinions, displaying “multiple voices” all at once. It is a collective, powerful publicity, which responds to the idea of “propaganda” itself, it questions targets and enemies of contemporary art. “Poster Exhibition” with this sense of power, can hopefully create a group conjecture on the mental map of collectivist society.

In “TOP Events”, this art project will build in a contemporary space a library of heterogeneous utopian symbols, images and language.