Furen Dai

Michel de Certeau articulates that urban walkers practice a “rhetoric of walking,” an operation parallel to language users: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”

Over the past two months, Furen Dai has wandered through the city—sometimes purposefully, sometimes aimlessly—performing her own “speech acts” in this city. This exhibition presents a series of photographs exploring vertical perspectives and horizontal meanderings of the city, and the dialectical relationship between viewing the city from above and experiencing it from within, upward or laterally.

A gardener must conceive gardens from both a distant perspective (in time and space) and immediate sensory experience to create spaces that serve multiple functions and provide varied experiences when viewed from different perspectives and at different times. Dai’s photographs capture elevated viewpoints, revealing the “conceptual city”—idealized, rational, planned, geometric—where the urban environment can be understood as a coherent whole. The works also bring us down to street level, where the city unfolds horizontally as lived experience—a series of dispersed moments flowing through time. Here, pedestrians navigate not through abstract concepts but through strategic maneuvers and subjective spatial engagement.

By juxtaposing these perspectives, Dai explores the “double city”: from above, a synchronic entity; from within, a diachronic experience. Aerial views present the city as a readable text, while street-level images record the speech acts of time, architects, and residents altering urban organization through collective dwelling practices. This interaction creates a productive tension: vertical perspectives present the city as a hierarchical subordinate structure, and horizontal perspectives reveal the juxtaposition of urban life, where experiences coexist in non-hierarchical relationships.

[1]  De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (translated by Steven Rendell). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Amphiphrasis, Broodthaers Society of America, New York, 2025

Furen Dai and Annalisa Alloatti & Mirella Bentivoglio

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Furen Dai and Annalisa Alloatti & Mirella Bentivoglio. For this exhibition, New York artist Furen Dai has made a series of site-sensitive sculptures that are informed by the architecture of the Broodthaers Society and in response to Storia del monumento, a concrete poem by Annalisa Alloatti & Mirella Bentivoglio.
        Furen Dai is interested in the symbiosis between her work, herself, and the institutions they inhabit. She approaches language, architecture, image production, and display with a mix of critical engagement and ambiguity. The effect of her work, however, is not so much an artist dealing with uncertainty as that of a forensic architect reimagining systems of control. Dai's sculptures are materially rich and labor intensive. They rely on an ancient technique for preparing a ground in which an admixture of chalk and rabbit skin glue is repeatedly applied, sanded, and reapplied. The resulting objects appear to have been recovered from memory or approximated from language. When lined up on the floor or stacked vertically, however, they produce a powerful sense of innuendo. 
        Storia del monumento (1968) is a serial concrete poem that graphically erects, destabilizes, and then topples the Italian word for "monument" out of the letters that make it up. Alloatti & Bentivoglio playfully rearranged the letters like two children playing with alphabet blocks, stacking them higher and higher so that the structure inevitably teeters and falls. In their telling, however, the story of the monument feels more like a liberation from convention than a tragedy of culture or history, suggesting, rightly, that some conventions very well need to be dismantled. It's significant that Alloatti & Bentivoglio's Storia del monumento conveys this sentiment with as more glee than malice. 
        Furen Dai (Changsha, China, 1988) earned a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston. She has participated in the New England Triennial, the Moscow International Video Art Festival, and the Edinburgh Artists' Moving Image Festival. Recently she has published Temporal Text, a critical analysis of the terms of identification used throughout the history of the United States Census (Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2023), and a contribution to Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, an epistolary manifesto published by Paper Monument (Brooklyn, 2021). She is an alumnus of numerous residency programs, most notably the ZK/U Center for Arts and Urbanism, Berlin, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York. 
        Annalisa Alloatti (Torino, 1926–2000) was a graphic artist whose work plied the space between visual and textual communication. Her work employed paravisual elements such as dots, time stamps, graphic shapes, and Braille, as well as nonverbal intonations. She participated in Arti visive. Poesia visiva (1976) and Mirella Bentivoglio's Materializzazione del linguaggio, the landmark group exhibition organized as part of the 1978 Venice Biennale. Important publications include Finzione [Fictions] and Cecità [Blindness], both published in 1975. 
        Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922–2017) grew up in Milan where she published her first poetry collection, Giardino, in 1943. By the mid-1960s she had abandoned conventional poetry for more visual- and material-based approaches, from typography and sculpture to concrete poetry and live performance. She was equally polymathic professionally, having worked as a professor, an art critic, and a curator in addition to being a poet and visual artist. The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College published the first English-language monograph on her work in 2015, and she was a key figure in Primary Information's Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, edited by Alex Bagliu and Mónica de la Torre.

Samples of earlier sculptural works, 2022-2024