Digging through a museum’s storage, its concrete substructure, and finding components—sometimes idle and unused bits, other times actual artworks from the museum’s collection—is part of Amsterdam-based Saskia Noor van Imhoff’s ethnographer-like practice. Following a legacy of institutional critique, the artist is in constant exchange with the institution. Whereas her predecessors dissected its parts to make the museum’s power visible, Van Imhoff is much more assertive and deftly complies with it, not as a means of acquiescence, but more as a tool for rewriting history.
A new floor was constructed over the original one, which was partially and purposefully “exposed”; rectangular and sleek wooden sculptures with colored plexiglass components; and hazy monochrome paintings leaning against the wall. All this formed part of the artist’s recent installation at Amsterdam’s de Appel art center. Van Imhoff repeatedly uses different structures, surfaces, and objects from everyday life, combining them in unexpected ways with original artworks or replicas without determining a hierarchy. Her emerging practice focuses on material form and presence, offering a new take on these key tenets of sculpture.
Innovative exhibition display, systems, and archeological approaches play into the work; for example, through the use of old pedestals and crates as well as humidifiers. Only ever using numerical titles for the installations and individual works within them (such as # +23.00 and # + 21.00) indicates an administrative approach, similar to a museum’s cataloging system, to an otherwise poetic ambiance.
For GB11, Van Imhoff is making an architectural intervention at the private Art Museum of Woo Jae Gil, transforming the white-cube space for temporary exhibitions, usually executed by the artist/owner of the museum, into an idiosyncratic installation. Similar to her other ventures, Van imhoff will respond to the given architectural elements of the space, select specific bits, and layer them into rhizomatic, nonlinear narratives.
Located in the eastern part of Gwangju near Mudeung Mountain, the Art Museum of Woo Jae Gil opened to the public in 2001, dedicated to Gwangju-based painter Woo Jae Gil and his oeuvre. The architect Seung Hyo Sang renovated the space to create a new cultural multiplex. JV + AM
self-presentation:
it resembles something I didn’t think he would make.
it isn’t visible either
but now it is
a round form, attached to which
is a tail, at the end of it
another round form.
the tail is horizontal, dipped
in sand.
he reads or has just read
leaning against a wall of plaster
a house, within it a large table
equal to the walls of the house
diagonal a table, in the corner
(right)
under the table a low beam
diagonal as well
outside the building again a table
this one sticks out a little
