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Panel Discussion with artists Jen Bervin, Charlotte Lagarde, Rory Ou, and Monika Lin
Thursday, October 2, 2025 , 10:00 am – 11:00 am CDT
Panel discussion about Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere, a five-channel video and textile installation on view in Jen Bervin’s solo exhibition. The panel features artists Jen Bervin, Charlotte Lagarde, Rory Ou, and Monika Lin, and is moderated by Kendra Paitz, director and chief curator.
Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere, created collaboratively by Jen Bervin and Charlotte Lagarde, premiered in Bervin’s 2020 survey exhibition at University Galleries. It is re-presented in her current exhibition, Shift Rotate Reflect.
The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji Tu.” Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in any direction to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations. Bervin and Lagarde created a rotation of four projected videos featuring commentary from eight Chinese women: an algorithmic game theorist, calligrapher, art researcher, astrophysicist, artist, novelist, and literary scholars. Bervin and Lagarde also partnered with a contemporary embroidery studio in Suzhou, China, to create two new renderings of the poem using a specialized double-sided silk embroidery technique on translucent silk screens. One of the finished embroideries and a video projection of the embroidery process are included in the installation.
Monika Lin is an artist featured in the video commentary. Rory Ou created xuanjitu, a web app that demonstrates possible readings of Xuanji Tu.
