Who: Wang Jianwei
What: “Spiral Ramp Library,” live performance held in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition “Wang Jianwei: Time Temple”
Where: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St., 212-423-3587
When: Thursday, February 12, $12, 8:00, and Friday, February 13, $15, 8:00
Why: “I always want to position my works, the exhibitions, and the audience’s relationship to the exhibitions as part of a process. The process includes changes that take place during different periods of time. For example, the production of works as time, the exhibition cycle as time, and the audience’s viewing experience in different locations as time,” Beijing-based artist Wang Jianwei says in a video about his Guggenheim exhibition, “Time Temple.” The exhibition consists of a room of painting and sculpture on view through February 16; the fifty-five-minute film The Morning Time Disappeared, inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, screening daily at 1:00; and the live multimedia performance event “Spiral Ramp Library,” taking place February 12-13 in the museum’s rotunda, incorporating sound, video, dance, theater, and improvisation, gathering ideas generated by the exhibition’s opening event, in which twenty speakers discussed ten topics, including maps, Jorge Luis Borges, climate, Frank Lloyd Wright, the universe, and the Guggenheim itself, in a way reimagining the building as Borges’s Tower of Babel in which every person is a book. (The February 13 performance will be followed by a Q&A with Wang.)