Once More Encore: The First Year of Benny's Video Remixed

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its New York space, _Once More Encore: The First Year of Benny's Video Remixed_, an exhibition by Benny's Video, a curatorial project of artist Craig Jun Li, on view from June 25 to August 7, 2026. Dubbed as a "nomadic curatorial project for freaks and lovers," from May 2025 to April 2026, Benny's Video was sited at a 130-square foot artist studio sublet in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and presented nine exhibitions. The scale of the location led to exhibitions consisting of two to seven artists. In parallel to connective interests across its program, several artists presented works in multiple exhibitions, creating a chainlink effect. Conceived as a single _extrospective_ exhibition, _Once More Encore: The First Year of Benny's Video Remixed_ brings together artists from all nine original exhibitions, remixed with alternate artworks by some artists, often from the same series. Bringing into this _encore_ are additional artists who have informed Li's curatorial thinking, and whose artworks hovered as an unconscious memory bank. While the combined footprint of the nine exhibitions could fit within Kiang Malingue, New York, for Li, "the specific dynamic and feelings of each original grouping of artworks in the studio sublet would not be replicable." A program of group exhibitions is a form that allows for ever-shifting, expanding relationships among artists and artworks to flourish continuously. The context of a commercial gallery and its different architectural specificity, offer an alter-format which simultaneously revisits Benny's Video's accretive layers of thinking in time, while expanding into a new exhibition on its own terms. Across nine exhibitions at Benny's Video, Li puts into relation wide-ranging practices where different artistic conversations and generations can resonate, through overlapping methodologies and ethos, tuning to artists who materialize and reflect on conditions of artistic production. These works are often realized through the mechanism of photography into conceptual and concrete configurations, and synthesize and problematize methods emerging out of research-based practices, moving image, and performances. By foregrounding the structure of display and production, and redirecting looking towards the periphery of the main event, artworks serve as a placeholder to address conditions where "other things happen." The selection of artworks, and the dialogue they form in installation prioritize close looking in real time and space. By reorienting the perception of an object or an image, the artworks share a spatial openness that point outwards and to each other, hinged (perhaps as in a two-way saloon door) "between recognition and imagination."