Nina Canell
Satin Ions
May 29–August 9, 2015
Opening: May 28, 6pm
Arko Art Center
2 Gallery (2F)
110-809, Dongsung-gil 3
Jongno-gu
Seoul
Korea
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11–19h
Free admission
Arko Art Center proudly presents the first solo exhibition in Korea by Swedish artist Nina Canell (born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden). The artist has shown widely internationally, yet Arko’s 2015 exhibition program marks the first time a comprehensive body of her work is presented in Asia.
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 “something that I find in my sculptural vocabulary—an extra-linguistic or non-verbal modulation of content—articulating the impurities of a medium or assemblage.”
For this occasion, Canell has 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. Contextualized by both recent and earlier works, the exhibition will consider sculpture as a medium of storage, transmission and reception.
Selected solo exhibitions include Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2014), Camden Arts Centre, London (2014), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2014), Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2013), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, (2012), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2011), Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Vienna (2010). Her work has been included in several international group exhibitions such as the 18th Biennale, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool; Manifesta 7, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. Within Asia, Nina Canell was introduced through group exhibitions such as Movement, Contingency and Community, Gallery 27, Kaywon School of Art & Design, Uiwang (2007) and Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2008).
For more information, contact hyojeon [at] arko.or.kr / T +82 2 760 4606.
