MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness Museum, 2012, documents, installation, performance

From 19 January to 20 April, 2014, UCCA hosted the large-scale exhibition “Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production,” a comprehensive presentation of this outstanding artist’s works and practice. Physique of Consciousness Museum was one of the artworks in this exhibition.

Physique of Consciousnessexists as both a performance and a large-scale installation. The performance, billed as the world’s first set of “cultural fitness exercises,” appropriates movements from religious rituals, worship ceremonies, and historical traditions for a series of ten workouts in an indictment of shallow yuppie spiritualism and its reduction of complex histories and cultures to lifestyle fads. Following the exhibition, MadeIn created the Physique of Consciousness Museum, a pseudo-archaeological project collecting and classifying images and objects from various cultures and histories according to an authoritative yet absurd taxonomy based on the Physique of Consciousness exercises.