For his GB11 commission, Tommy Støckel (b. 1972, Copenhagen/Berlin) developed The Gwangju Rocks, a series of rock characters inspired by the artificial nature and rock fixtures in the city of Gwangju. In Gwangju, as well as in many other places in Korea, many rock displays are present in gardens, along pedestrian paths, and in entrance areas to buildings. Some of these rock fixtures seem to defy the natural order of things: for example, in the public park on the way to the Gwangju Craft Museum from the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall, a huge rectangular slab is placed on top of a small, square piece. And on Guangnam-roe, Gwangju city’s main street, three more or less oval-shaped rocks balance one on top of the other inside a narrow a strip of green next to the pedestrian pavement. Fascinated by such artificial nature, Støckel has 3D-scanned selected rocks from all over Gwangju, rendered them digitally, and developed them into characters of their own. These characters have been projected with their own actions, expressions, and mishaps, and, through this, have the potential as emoji characters whose expressions can be used for everyday communication on instant messaging applications.
The rocks and their imagined “actions” are turned into sculptures handcrafted in paper on show in the exhibition hall, made by Støckel during his extended residency in Gwangju from July to September 2016. These rocks, or, rather, their digital and/or physical simulacra, rocks as we think we know them, inhabit multiple spaces. They enter not only into the digital space we have become so dependent on for communication, but also the exhibition space, a different climate whereby art sometimes comes into contact with our lives. By assembling and animating the nature simulacrum in this carefree, intuitive way, what appears to be a simple, natural order begins to look childish, helpless; some kind of power is simultaneously deconstructed and exposed.
Støckel is interested in the tension between technological precision and the randomness and tactility of the quotidian. His curiosity into the oscillation between randomness and orderliness of life in general is found not only in his sculptures, but also his writing—Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow and Other Fictions (2013)—and typography—Studio Font (2016)—comprised of an alphabet entirely made of objects from his studio. KVP + MW
self-presentation:
Tommy Støckel studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen and is currently living in Berlin. His projects are centered around possible ways of working with sculpture, spaces, and situations. The works are often speculations about possible futures and alternative pasts, handmade reconstructions of digital objects, or systems to generate random sculpture arrangements.
His exhibitions include “Ist das Leben nicht schön?,” Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; “Tommy Støckel’s Art of Tomorrow,” Arnolfini, Bristol; “3 Sculptures,” SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; “Ten Transports that Shaped the Work,” Jacob’s Island, London; and “8 Accidental Arrangements,” Kunsthalle São Paulo, São Paulo. Recently, his book “Studio Font” was published by Infinite Greyscale.
