Cross Section of a Revolution curated by Andreas Leventis

Allora & Calzadilla, Broomberg & Chanarin, Liu Xiaodong, Haroon Mirza, Rashid Rana, Wael Shawky, Santiago Sierra

This group exhibition of Lisson Gallery artists explores global aspects of trade, trauma, religious belief systems and contested territories, via a number of intersecting political practices, across photographic, sculptural, painterly and filmic media.

Beginning at the crossroads between Central and Eastern Asia, Liu Xiaodong’s Hotan Project (2012-13) depicts Muslim locals of the Xinjiang province digging for rare jade deposits in the notorious opencast mines and devastated landscapes of one of China’s most remote and politically tense regions. Painting from life over a period of two months spent with the jade miners, Liu’s “dirtily realistic” (according to curator Hou Hanru) monumental canvas, East, one of a quartet, captures the disenfranchised Uygur people eking out their living through transactions of precious stones with the ruling Han Chinese. Further along the Silk Road, across the border into Pakistan, is where Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet (2008) originates, although his transliteration of a traditional, mystical and ritualistic Persian rug is disconcertingly woven out of a digital micro-mosaic of gory images of bloodied goats, culled at abattoirs in Lahore.