info

press release
exhibition text
In the atmosphere remains - companion text  to the show
Aftermath - epilogue
Photos by Logan Wolfe and Yun Gi Ahn

“How can something be made (or make itself) by unclaiming capture?
How can something, rather than formally assuming a typical relationship of belonging to its own idea, radically unclaim that connection, to work solely as a sacrificial, oblique return system, a channel upstreaming to an original pulse?
How can something just be bankside to a river/field, to a stream that is continuous, and continuously opening?” [note to self, March 14th, 2023]
Rooting in such paradoxical questioning to eventually develop as a material, performative and theoretical methodology, To Kiss on a Battlefield revolves on creating and iterating ground. Synthetic sweat is assembled and spread over the gallery floor, drying and crystallizing over time. A DMX-controlled light tied to the solar cycle faintly illuminates the space, then plunges it into darkness, cycling every forty minutes.  Six engraved metal plates lay flat on the floor, their engravings gradually covered by the people’s stepping over them. Three performers enter with the other visitors, crouch on the ground and slide through the sweat to eventually meet and kiss in the dark. Offering a place to be and nothing to see, To Kiss is a cut running through exhibitional dynamics and the violent assumptions that embed the very acts of seeing (contra looking) and identifying. In Act I, these are both exacerbated and neutralized to acknowledge, expose, and relegate trauma (traced back to its Greek root, 'wound') as the defining paradigm of contemporary life and thought—an exposure and a relegation that allow for an informal imagination of kissing as an inverse, alternative paradigm. "To make something by subjecting it to the same forces that make life unlivable, and to do it as if its aesthetic life depended on it, charges what is made with an incalculable urgency" (P. Chan)