No Space Like Home
art-workers’ daily grind as a case for art/sociological study

 

Hanmi Gallery is pleased to announce No Space Like Home, the exhibition, which examines the appearance of private and working zone within a living space and time of an art-worker, featuring the practice of four artists – Adrian Nettleship, Ang Song Nian, Jinwook Moon and Oliver Lee Terry.

 

Due to its ability to be capitalised, artists’ daily routine and experience is being turned into the means of art-production. The private overlaps and compromises with the nonscheduled working hours in sake of ongoing art-work. However, it is the artists’ awareness and agreement on the situation that attracts the curatorial interest. Such awareness reveals a more complex layer for addressing the economy of New Capitalism in Art, where even the personal human concerns and self-irony of the artists is being transferred into the tools for ongoing artistic research.

 

In their practice the four featured artists – Adrian Nettleship, Ang Song Nian, Jinwook Moon and Oliver Lee Terry, look into the key aspects of art-workers’ private life – personal object-hood, home and daily experience, forced into the domain of art-production. Thus, the artworks appear as documentation for the artistic enquiry, representing the humdrum moments of being as a challenging and motivating case for art/sociological study.

 

The exhibition is structured as an interactive game-like journey, so the visitors are invited to travel through the artistic daily grind and its evaluations from the view-point of an insider, to share the artists’ sensations and concerns on a personal level of conversation through the artworks.

 

Hanmi Gallery is due to undergo major refurbishment but is currently open to the public with a program of interim exhibitions, of which No Space Like Home, curated by Sasha Burkhanova is the 20st show. The grand opening will take place in Autumn 2013.

 

Influenced by Tom Hunter’s idea of ‘propaganda to counter-propaganda’, Adrian  Nettleship seeks to dispel the myths, created by power authorities around an artists’ dwelling like squat and its community for an outsider.

 

Occupy and Explore was originally produced as a multimedia project to be shown on the web. It lays out paths through a squat, leading the viewer along coloured trails of string to meet the occupants and explore the house. It allows a glimpse into the activities, workings and beliefs underpinning the squat. Building his artistic investigation on a model of sociological study, Adrian Nettleship presents his work as an interactive map, documenting his findings, so the spectator is able to experience the very personal aspects of artists’ life within a public space of a gallery. At the same time the privacy of home, addressed in Occupy and Explore reads in context of the “borrowed space” of squats, raising the issue of artists’ home as a ‘fluid social structure’.

 

Ang Song Nian develops the issue of materialisation of the home spirit, examining the relationships between individuals and their object-hood. Objects carry the burden of responsibilities that include acquisition, use, care, storage, and disposal, and the expanding number of items in our homes over the past decades caused a shift in people’s behaviour away from human interaction to interaction with inanimate objects or via them; an individual’s home appears as transformed from a spiritual private zone into a physical objects-built construction.

 

Towards A New Interior (2012) serves as as an experimental study of overlapped physical and spiritual spaces, and situations that explore and exploit the conceptual space in-between. The projects appears as  a research dairy, based on investigation of the human-constructed private zone: the photographic study is  accompanied by written accounts and a real-life site specific installation. The artist positions himself as an outsider, which turns his personal concerns and emotions into the research tools.

 

Spreading the experiment about individual/object relationship to the field of communication, information exchange and cognitive space, Jinwook Moon investigates the nature of inevitable errors within existing daily language. Such errors result into misunderstanding and misinterpretation of everyday information, orchestrated by the power institutions in order to control the daily agenda of the society. The idea of danger of misleading was developed in The Untitled Text (2012) installation and the BBC Ding (2013) video work. For The Untitled Text Moon creates an language system based on the personal objects, initially preoccupied with their common meanings. The capacity of his artificial language to speculate on the mundane information reception is further developed in the BBC Ding video, where the artist’s language of mundane objects is employed to translate a BBC News block. The issues of war, immigration, political conflicts and other global social concerns appear as replaced by the everyday fuss, so the institutional propaganda of conformist meanings and the public agreement on it is being addressed to.

 

In his practice Oliver Lee Terry focuses on the ambiguity of valuation within the industry of mainstream culture and contemporary art. The overlapping and oppositional meanings of the concept of value are being criticised via a playful approach of self-ironisation. Through an interrogation of complicity in the fine arts and in the visual forms of contemporary culture, an ambivalent sentiment between the critique and celebration appears. It brings together the seductive forces of materialism and the tropes of contemporary art industry, while Oliver’s sculptures – How Ya Kickin’ It? (Take it EZ) (2013), Tile Service I-III (2013), appear as pedestals for the art and mass-produced visual culture to share. Here the personal objects are being approached as “transparent containers of personal value”, and the fact that those are often employed in Oliver’s installations brings up the question: what are the working hours of an artist after all, as it seams like the lifetime, sensations and personal belongings either already are, or have a visible potential to be irreversibly utilised in the art-production?..

 

No Space Like Home appears as a fruit of curatorial interest in art-workers’ perception of their mundane reality “outside the studio”, developed by Sasha Burkhanova in her practice. With methodology borrowed from economical sociology, the curator invites the artists and spectators to look into the daily grind, which affects the art-production, from a joint position of observer-and-participant. In this respect the exhibition appears as an interactive map and documentation that captures the findings and personal sensations gained by artists in course of the research, to be shared with the audience.