CIFRA, the curatorial media art platform, has opened In the Shadows of Paradise, an online exhibition curated by David Elliott that gathers video artworks produced across the last three decades by artists and collectives from Africa, China, Europe, Japan, Russia and Singapore. The presentation grows out of an idea Elliott first tried out on a far smaller scale in London four years ago, and a curatorial essay accompanying the show is set to appear this week.
Elliott first presented an early form of the concept in 2022 at Troy House in London, where the selection centred on video works from China. For this new edition, the theme has widened into an international survey covering a much longer span, reaching from pieces made in the early 2000s through to works completed as recently as 2024.
Working from the notion of “paradise” and the way its meaning keeps shifting, the exhibition looks at how artists respond to political power, social change, environmental transformation, memory and individual freedom. Throughout the chosen works, landscapes, cities, technologies, political systems and personal histories become settings in which rival ideas of progress and utopia are put under pressure.
Artists featured in the show include Shingo Yoshida, Theo Eshetu, Liang Yue, Shen Xin, Chen Qiulin, Loong Pan, Chto Delat, Zheng Guogu, AES+F, Zhou Xiaohu, Pavel Otdelnov and Ong Kían Peng.
A number of the works address these questions through landscape and environmental change. Shingo Yoshida’s Haunting Spirits (2019) revisits the volcanic terrain of Izu Oshima, an island where criminals and dissidents were once confined, tortured and executed. Theo Eshetu’s Dead Boys in Paradise (2024) travels through the waters around Lamu, Kenya, linking the area to histories of the slave trade, colonialism, mortality and deep human time. Chen Qiulin’s Farewell Poem (2002–2007) records how landscapes and communities were transformed during construction of the Three Gorges Dam, while With Light with Shadow (2019) uses movement to explore identity, physical distance and independence. Ong Kían Peng’s AI-generated Disaster Free (2024) pictures a future Singapore reshaped by rising sea levels and flooding.
Other pieces in the exhibition turn instead to ideology, propaganda, luxury and mediated reality. Chto Delat’s One Night in a Social Network (2020) is an opera-farce concerned with propaganda and the manufacture of truth, while AES+F’s The Feast of Trimalchio (2009) draws on Petronius’s first-century satire to examine luxury and social hierarchy through a contemporary version of paradise.
The platform presents the exhibition as part of a continuing series exploring how artists respond to changing environments and structures of power, with further chapters expected to follow.
David Elliott is a curator, writer, lecturer and cultural historian whose work in modern and contemporary art extends over more than four decades. He has directed institutions including the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo — where he was founding director — and Istanbul Modern, which he led as its first director. His curatorial work has long centred on placing Western and non-Western contemporary art in conversation with one another.
CIFRA itself is a curatorial media art platform devoted to presenting, documenting and sustaining media art over the long term, connecting artists, galleries, curators, institutions, collectors and audiences while giving works a wider curatorial and institutional context.
