Conceptualized by Nina Canell and Robin Watkins, this monograph accompanies the artist's first solo exhibition in Asia and consists of ten short new texts around which fragments of communication with the authors have been punctuated by observational photographs and sculptural documentation. Contextualized by both recent and earlier works, the exhibition and book considers sculpture as a medium of storage, transmission and reception.
For Canell there is no mediation that is lossless—an output is never the pure transmission of a source—but always as much the distance it has travelled, the things it has come in contact with or bounced with or off. She is interested in the consistency of distances that can be traced through an arbitrary sense of material precision: utilising water, viscosity, synthetic carpets, electricity, surface tension, stray socks and chewing gum. This consistency, at times imperceptible and at times palpable, is what the artist describes as “an extra-linguistic or non-verbal modulation of content—articulating the impurities of a medium or assemblage.” For her first solo exhibition in Asia, Canell made research into the production and distribution of fiber optic sheaths in the outskirts of Seoul, where cable mounds are sorted according to colour and eventually remoulded into the synthetic circumferences of future relations. Literally caught in between melting and being repurposed, several hundred meters of gutted sheaths are compressed into dense lumps of immaterial distance.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Arko Art Center, Seoul, from May 29 to August 9, 2015.
Born 1979 in Växjö (Sweden), Nina Canell lives and works in Berlin. Her installations give concrete expression to the lightness and intangibility of the everyday. The natural materials she presents—water, stone, air, earth, wood, copper—are traversed by electric arcs and heat sources, giving rise to delicate, ephemeral physical reactions that reveal and underscore our innate relationship with our immediate environment. Her work has recently been shown at the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Camden Arts Centre (London), the Sydney Biennial, at MoMA and the Swiss Institute (New York), and at the 13th Lyon Biennale.
Edited by Hyunjin Kim and Hyo Gyoung Jeon.
Texts by Hu Fang, Jenny Jaskey, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, Fionn Meade, Hyunjin Kim, Sung Hwan Kim, Kari Rittenbach, Anja Isabel Schneider, Monika Szewczyk, Jason Wirth.
