Telic Arts Exchange

If you don’t count Distributed, Telic is no longer a gallery in Chinatown. Its a shame that the conceptual installations, lectures, and performances are now gone. Nowadays the exhibitions are in video form at Ooga Booga or The Public School. There are still screenings. They still have the space in Berlin but they focus on publishing books and DVDs.

The space is one of the many unassuming galleries tucked away in the backside alley some call Chungking Road. Although I consider this review to inevitably slip into being a review of the exhibit rather than the space itself, I’ll try to bear the venue as a space in mind while doing this. The exhibit I attended was the one found in tamala’s review and I must say that the frames — all 200 of them! — were placed in a way best suited for the venue itself. In one of the corner’s was a projector, presumably showing slides of the images hanging on the walls, and in another was someone with what looked to be a Buchla synth or some sort of contraption of the analogue and modular variety. The performance kind of seemed like an afterthought, only inspired by the idea of having «a modular synth in a gallery.» It did showcase the potential of the space as a gallery-​slash-​performance space, but with its LFO driven noise-​generator, I left with a bit of a headache. It was as much of a non-​sequitor as any old stale caricature of things that bear the label «avant-​garde.»
The space is tall yet cozy. It’s at the tail end of the alleyway and snakes into a courtyard that can be said to be ideal for night outings. Oh yeah, and the gallery, like the others around it was free and most of the time, you really can’t go wrong with free.