To enter and exit the Biennale exhibition hall, one passes through Ruth Buchanan’s (b. 1980, Wellington/Berlin) site-specific work. A curtain of intensely colored chains running from the ceiling all the way down to the floor, they signal a shift in not only space, but also experience as the chains create the onomatopoeic cut “schhhhhhhhhhh” as they come into contact with the moving bodies passing through them. Here the thought of a split taking place between the complexity of inside and outside, public and private, individual and collective, beginning and end is both exaggerated and destabilized through the quality of the material used and reconditioning of the normative function of such areas, One passes through a similar curtain of chains upon exiting the hall, after passing through a zone which borrows seating from the public areas surrounding the Biennale; a gradual temperature change in yet another transition space, as GB11 extends to its outdoors work and other sites around Gwangju.
Buchanan interrogates and stretches the mechanisms that produce culture, such as publications and art organizations, as well as the infrastructure and architecture that contain them. As a way of highlighting the transitory and highly choreographed architectural nature of spaces, she often inserts structures such as curtains, grids, and panels into passageways and windows. Here language is deployed in its most expanded form as a powerful system of social organization. The particularities of the Biennale exhibition hall, and the institutional structures to which it is bound, is thus a core focus of Buchanan’s new work. How does this purpose-built exhibition hall situate itself within the residential neighborhood that it is in? What kind of artistic gestures and intervention does it call for, to signal, as well as to extend, the climate and terrain of art? MW
self-presentation:
In Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude, a novel that looks at structures, relationships, time, and place, Mansfield makes a remark that I repeatedly return to. Describing what it is to be a subject with a body in a social world, she writes “what one set of eyes looks at is both private but indeed the world as it is.” This short sentence tracks itself along the strange and wobbly lines between public and private, interior and exterior, self and other, control and powerlessness, asking much of us as readers and players in the image it conjures, an image that projects and refracts back into and through the looking and interpreting body. Beyond poetry, beyond metaphor, this sentence shatters the page and asks that we renegotiate our understanding of economies of exchange, viewership, and ownership of particular positions, suggesting a recalibrating of logics that goes to the core of what art can be, the space to reappraise, reconfigure, contest.
