In the midst of today’s technological developments that disconcert awareness and disrupt the continuity of a latent relationship both to the past and to the future, Bik Van der Pol’s project for GB11 creates a reflexive environment that holds within possibilities for engagement and dialogue. Drawing upon how individual and collective experiences of space are being transformed by modulations of advanced lighting techniques, this luminary environment is invested with abstractions that evolve into a ground for sharing. The leitmotif of light awakens experiences that have been left underexposed, and the patterns that expand across the space, and run upon the encompassing curtains, generate links deep into the history of language and aspire to a community of consciousness to come. Here is a place right in the heart of the exhibition halls where May Mothers, a group of women who formed an organization following the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, are invited to bring their collective activities, where their narratives are set in motion to inspire a space of contact and communication.
The LED lights, which are being used increasingly to affect not only the growth of plants but also the mood of people, point at our vision of the contemporary moment, at how urban nightscapes are perceived and how public spaces, human behaviors, and ecological life are being altered altogether by the rapacious ambitions of economic efficiency. The pattern of the LED lights relies on a speculative association between the traditional motifs of Korean quilts and the formal elements that compose the characters, vowels, and consonants of the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Shapes of light go beyond the here and now, traverse zones of abstraction, and affect experiences in a human-centered atmosphere, one that is physically and psychologically under the influence of specific wavelengths. This is a passage through the connective potentials of language toward future encounters, giving rise to speech and the interaction of recollections. This built environment is dedicated to launching a communicative habitat that revolves around the activities of those who have invested their lives in processing the affective aftermath of traumatic events of the immediate and distant past.
AM
Activity by May Mothers Sept 5-Nov 6, every Monday and Wednesday 11am-14.30pm, except on public holidays
self-presentation:
Duende, artist initiative, 1984–2013
Trust weekend at Tramway in Glasgow in 1995
The Kitchen Piece (1996) and The Bookshop Piece (1996)
PS1 residency, New York, 1999–2000
Nomads & Residents, from 2000
School of Missing Studies, from 2003
Frieze projects: accumulate, collect, show, 2011
ROAD/BOAT 3.1.8, a journey and two-week-long discussion on learning processes with Christoph Keller, Helmut Batista, Amilcar Packer, by invitation of Anne Ballester Soares and the Xapomi school, Amazonas, Brazil. Organized by CAPACETE, Rio de Janeiro.
