Xin Liu: The White Stone
Xin Liu, The White Stone, 2021
HD video, colour, sound, 21 min 57 sec. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles
About the work
When the rocket lifts off, her body falls.
For centuries, humans have built cities on the ruins of the old. Now, civilization builds a world at its highest point: the lower earth orbit.
This film explores a future history of abandonment and recovery through a ‘hunt’ for rocket debris in remote areas. The protagonist ventures through valleys, villages and deserts in southwest China, searching for debris from rockets that have fallen since the 1990s. She imagines being the first to witness a white stone’s fall – either in a dramatic crash or a quiet descent, unnoticed except by animals.
In this story, the white stone is the fallen body of a rocket. By shifting our gaze from the sky to the ground, we reconsider the lifespan of technologies, marking the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object.
About the artist
Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang, China) is an artist and engineer based in London. She creates experiences to measure our personal, social, and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world: between gravity and homeland, sorrow and the composition of tears, gene sequencing, and astrology.
About ICA x FRIEZE FILM LONDON
Frieze Film returns to Frieze London in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The curated selection of seven films will be screened throughout Frieze Week, 8–13 October, at the ICA and on frieze.com.
The programme showcases films from galleries with a focus on early-career and under-exposed artists. This year’s films were selected by a jury including Steven Cairns (Head of Artistic Programme at the ICA), Myriam Mouflih (Curator, Writer and Programmer at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival) and Guilherme Blanc (Artistic Director of Batalha Centro de Cinema and curator of independent cinema and moving image) for the second year.
