Blue of Noon
Group exhibition with Nils Alix-Tabeling, Sharona Franklin, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho, Sydney Shen, Ambera Wellmann and Alison Yip at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery.
The 1935 novel Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille posits the duality of revolutionary acts within shifting paradigms, namely those of active dissent and nihilism. Set in the backdrop of an impending war, the characters within the story navigate a seemingly endless amount of chaos, corruption, and death. The works within the exhibition Blue of Noon approach modes of resistance in response to the violence of normativity, colonization, upheaval, and erasure of personal histories. By hosting this assemblage, the exhibition environment transforms into a frantic and macabre vision, at times anthropomorphizing these drives into otherworldly, even monstrous figurations.
Embodying the year of the Fire Monkey, which was predicted by astrologists to be characteristic of havoc, blood, impulsiveness, and inflammation, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho’s Monkey King (2018) sculpture bears its organs outside, against its hollow, resinous body. Red strings thread through the center, as though linking strange clues, connecting a schema synthesized based on variously sourced organizing principles: from the rebellious monkey king’s journey to enlightenment (according to popular Chinese mythology) to the conventional systems of Western medicine; from the left-right axis of political ideologies to the speculative numerology of art fairs. Two preliminary sketches for the monkey king abstract its form even further as its organs float outward and hang from plant-like stems.
Curated by Christina Gigliotti and Catherine Wang.
Exhibition opening 20 May 2022, 6-9pm.
When? Where?
21 May - 30 June 2022
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Kohlfurter Str. 41/43
10999 Berlin