Yonatan Eshban-Laderman: You define your practice as a curatorial collective with a nomadic ethos. Could you elaborate on this self-description and discuss how an exhibition centered on chance, muteness, and fractured cultural centers fits within that ethos?
Fanfan Yuxuan Fan: My curatorial vision examines the shared uncertainties, displacements, and aspirations of our generation. I founded FanFlus around a nomadic ethos: decentralized, fluid, and wary of hierarchy. Nomadism means staying unanchored to any single discourse or geography. I’m drawn to how artists negotiate our fragmented world, allowing different histories to enter dialogue without being reduced to equivalence. I approach curation as a process of listening, holding contradictions intact. This feels urgent now, as structures that once organized meaning – a cultural center, a shared political vocabulary – are failing. Dumb Luck happens when you take that failure seriously. I wanted the exhibition to behave as the world feels: load-bearing where it shouldn’t be, occasionally beautiful in its collapse. A nomadic practice suits this moment; it doesn’t need a center.
Yonatan: How do you approach the physical act of curating when working with an artist like Sher, whose practice actively breaches and interferes with the gallery’s architecture? How does managing these spatial invasions—like displacing ceiling tiles or pulling out walls—differ from your usual curatorial process?
Fanfan: Honestly, I advocate for letting artists do whatever they want. As long as the owner consents and the space is restored, why not? When Paz started cutting into the wall, I was nervous. I told him, “I have a deposit sitting with the space owner, so ensure I get every cent back once the show is over, Paz!” He was completely unfazed: “I know, Fanfan.” He renovated the entire wall for his last solo show himself, so I exhaled and trusted him. In practice, this isn’t fundamentally different from how I normally curate; constraints usually come from the space owner, not me. I love this kind of chaos, Paz tearing things open and playing with the architecture. He pairs a builder’s technical fluency with an artist’s sensibility. I encourage artists to do something wild and unreasonable, so as long as it’s realistically feasible, I’ll make it happen.
Yonatan: The horse operates as a significant motif in this show, particularly in Cross Tied and Tondo. What does this creature uncover for the viewer regarding autonomy and restraint, and how do you see it anchoring the exhibition’s broader conceptual logic?
Fanfan: In Tondo, Paz enlarged a photograph of an escaped horse from a bombed stable using AI. The horse stands with its right hind leg raised, its head twisted at an odd angle. Yet the image is enclosed by a round, breast-like food cover. An escaped horse is captured by the camera, captured by a cover, captured by a single breast. Here, the animal’s autonomy is restrained by the viewer’s gaze, questioning whether seeing a horse detached from our conventions as to where it belongs – seeing it free and on its own – is even possible. In Cross Tied, Paz uses the freestanding wall. On the backside, a bound monitor shows a tied horse making a failing attempt to step forward. On the other side, a horseshoe-shaped bronze sculpture hangs from the same strap, resembling rotten banana peels.
I see autonomy as an open-ended question, restraint is compromise, even a form of powerlessness. These works evoke a desire for autonomy alongside the inability to leave one’s conditions. The horse anchors the exhibition’s logic: how we negotiate between the impulse to act and the structures that hold us in place. How do we claim autonomy to take action in the world?
Yonatan: The press release references Roger Caillois’s concept of “alea”—the game of pure chance—suggesting that openness to contingency can constitute a form of resistance. As a curator, how do you intentionally stage a space that feels governed by an ungovernable, near-fated logic, without entirely losing control of the exhibition’s narrative?
Fanfan: Caillois separates ‘alea’ (chance) from ‘agon’ (competition). In ‘agon’, you compete; in ‘alea’, you wait. Skill is negated, demanding surrender. Crucially, “alea” cannot coexist with “paidia,” pure unstructured play: it is grounded in restraint. You wait for the external without intervention. “Pure chance” is not chaos. It is discipline. Caillois notes that ‘alea’ is the disorder that persists inside a society built on “agon”. Democracies pretend outcomes reflect merit, but the accident of birth never disappears. Paz and I are responding to this: the structures meant to organize meaning fairly are failing, and the undercurrents were never as governed as we pretended. Staging “alea” is an honest acknowledgment of the logic already running underneath.
Curating, I once joked with my artist friend Wenfei Quan, feels like cooking, with fresh ingredients, you barely have to try. I admired Paz’s work long before we ever collaborated, following his work, every show, and trusting his near-genius ability to conjure a “site”.
Going into this show, I gambled too, deliberately choosing not to interfere and letting him do whatever he wanted. It wasn’t blind faith but a calculated bet, built on knowing his instincts well enough to predict them. I only stepped in when he was undecided, and even then, he rarely took my advice, which was fine. I’d placed the bet. And it paid off exactly as I’d hoped.
Yonatan: Your work frequently relies on intense material assemblages and architectural reconfigurations. How does the physical construction of Dumb Luck continue to develop these material interests?
Paz Sher: My approach starts with having no rules about the materials or the techniques I use. Every project dictates its own language, relying on intuition that keeps the process in a constant state of change and play. Therefore, picking the materials is more about keeping an open channel – an internal dialogue with what’s available to me in everyday life. Space is the extension of consciousness, so once objects interact with it, they shift from semiotics, being mere signifiers, to a more complex poetic language. Objects are shifted and displaced into a structured system that in the current show emerged from features that triggered me in the gallery space.
Seeing the gap between the wall and ceiling, I wanted to ‘throw a rope’ to balance the monitor and the cast bronze. The two back left corners of the gallery seemed like a “doubled corner”, a good fit for two sculptures to communicate. Removing a ceiling tile let a sculpture fall through. Digging into the wall – at what point should I stop interfering?
Although I reconfigure spaces in many of my projects, I don’t distinguish developments between them, only the differences in what the physical construction does in a specific show. The construction offers gestures – spaces where my sculptures (and assemblages) can live – and an infrastructure for how people encounter them. In Dumb Luck, the space turns into a dynamic mechanism interacting with what’s beyond the gallery space.
Yonatan: In Untitled (Corner I & II), you utilize the form of police batons but strip them of their immediate physical threat, rendering them in foam or flattened aluminum. What happens to the aura of state-sanctioned violence and systems of control when they are made impotent, or even absurdly phallic, within the gallery space?
Paz Sher: Every social structure contains systems of control at different scales. The question at stake is how we embed violence within them and what measures a society can bear before collapsing. Does state-sanctioned violence exist as a necessity? These questions don’t mean I don’t resist all forms of violence. It comes from an observation that violence exists and the concern that different forms can easily cross lines and shift a regime into a tragic phase.
My work tackles this by expanding the language around violence and masculinity, which is often narrowed down to only its negative implications, leaving no balance. Humor is crucial here. I dismantle the necessity of violence not by impotence, but by offering alternative views. There are many cultures that have figures of mythological deities with exaggerated phalluses. Today, we can find in many different countries souvenirs for tourists of a decorated or just weirdly carved penis (Greece, Mexico, Amsterdam). When I see them, I am always partly embarrassed, partly laughing, and wondering what it does in a society from a broader perspective. I guess most people laugh when they see it, and I think it’s important.
However, its possibilities and what it actually does in the world stay ambiguous. I stripped the physical threat from a singular baton, but multiplied it into entangled compositions. Systematic violence is enacted through coordinated institutional structures, so a cluster of these batons might feel more threatening when we recall how this violence works outside the gallery space.
This is how I think the aura of state-sanctioned violence relocates within the gallery – not dismantled, but shifted to this discussion. By the way, there is also a solid cast iron baton on the floor under the painted foam batons. This baton is extremely heavy to the point it can’t be used, and one can feel the gravity of this object. The flattened aluminum batons are suspended in one corner by the broken wall, while the foam batons grow in stacks and disappear into the walls in another corner – like an office plant. Both articulate opposing tensions of social processes, one of an invasive nature and the other more evasive, more tricky.
Yonatan: For Tondo, you took an image of an escaped horse from a bombed stable and expanded it using generative AI before covering it with a domestic object. What happens to the documentary truth of an image born from conflict when it is subjected to algorithmic expansion and obscured by the banal?
Paz Sher: Amidst our constant flow of images in which we are exposed to all calamities around the globe (true and false), the image was born within the banality of what I see daily. I don’t think we should be overly concerned with its documentary ‘truth.’ The documentary aspect can give a broader context of this event, but it is external information to the work. All images today are subjected to manipulation. Tondo is the Italian word for a round painting or a round relief and we can observe this work like a painting. The image, the horse, the conflict, the reality to which all these subjects belong, exist regardless of my interventions. I would look for truth in the immediate experience of seeing the piece. The AI expansion and obscurity heighten the question: what is this horse doing stuck behind a mesh food cover single breast? For me, that is a sufficient starting point for a truth.
Baudrillard theorized the simulacrum as an image detached from any original, one that doesn’t just represent reality but replaces it once seen. Within our time of AI-generated images, we should revisit the idea of image hyper-reality. In my case, AI only invented the pixels around the documented horse. However, considering I came across this image on my feed, the truth of every image one sees today depends on the reliability of the sources and the belief of the viewers. Perceiving a ‘true’ world became immensely complicated. What matters to me is that this image doesn’t coerce an opinion about the documented horse. I like the blue glow the mesh creates around the horse. Once someone looks closely, they can find truths with more details.
Yonatan: Your spatial interventions force the viewer into highly specific, often restrictive orientations, such as navigating around the inverted, suspended table in Gamblers’ Run or engaging with disembodied casts embedded in the walls. Could you discuss the mechanics of staging these physical remnants and what it means to implicate the viewer in these spatial traps?
Paz Sher: Something I like about art is that certain works elevate our consciousness to a higher level of awareness. Art can shift us from the familiar self toward an unpredictable experience; I believe art can be adventurous. Framing an artwork as a ‘trap’ assumes it has negative results – it’s like saying in everything one encounters, there is manipulation in play, every artwork seduces, and every image attempts to influence our mind. I believe that seeing traps as a premise for many of our relationships is a symptom of our time. I prefer to think of the artwork through a Derridean lens where meaning is structurally deferred, sometimes unresolved, rather than fixed. Neither the viewer nor I should know exactly what the encounter will yield, and yet I trust that there might be something to gain in such an experience.
I stage the encounter because that’s how art works, offering a possibility or an opportunity to get closer to the artwork’s essence. The cast aluminum ear embedded in the wall suggests an external listener, becoming an invitation because what one should hear is left unsaid. I urge viewers to follow that listener, to develop an inner voice to manifest the relationships between them and the work. Staging the encounter – as in Gamblers’ Run, the cut wall, Paralyzed, etc. – imposes restrictions on our movement or sight, but it works like a dance with the viewers: a path toward open-ended engagement with an unknown outcome. I find this space a dynamic mechanism through these thresholds, activating us in the gallery and, hopefully, turning into an internal voice within a beholder when they walk outside.
