metropolis m

A national pavilion at the world’s oldest art biennale can be a logical place for an artist whose ‘career’ has been vigorously progressing – an artist like Haegue Yang, born and raised in South Korea and now active in Europe for about a decade. Only, one might wonder whether such a spectacular institutional framework can ever accommodate her work properly. Yang creates various forms of temporary spaces – often with blinds and lights as their main components – that evoke the absences, deficits, estrangements and distances that are so typical of contemporary interpersonal relationships. As yet, however, the presentation in the Korean pavilion need not contradict Yang’s persistent engagement. South Korea was the last country to get its own pavilion in the Giardini. Built on the site of a former public toilet in 1996, the Korean pavilion looks modest, like a small and humble house between the pompous pavilions of Germany and Japan. Moreover, it is one of the most visited sites for the city’s homeless during the periods when the park is empty. Yang embraces the atmosphere of this site, which is overshadowed by the representational, competitive bright floodlights of the event. She plans to tie this atmosphere to her ongoing exploration of spatiality, and in particular our consciousness of poverty.Her presentation will consist of three parts: an abstract reconstruction of the kitchen in her Berlin flat, entitled Salim (‘domesticity’ in Korean); a new Series of Vulnerable Arrangements, this time subtitled Voice and Wind; and a video essay titled Doubles and Halves: Events with Nameless Neighbours. The video aims to imbue the whole constellation with a narrative. Showing a ‘ghost town’ in the poorer area of Seoul, where Yang’s other home was until recently, when her co-inhabitants were forced to leave so as to make room for the erection of yet another South-Korean ‘apartment forest’, the video combines images of this area with a voiceover that, instead of deploring the consequences of systemic violence against the poor, speaks of the poverty of her neighbours from an unusual perspective: her deliberate identification with them and their poverty as a form of wealth. ‘In other words, we diligently accumulate the assets of poverty. Thus we remain rich, since this wealth of ours is inexhaustible.’Yang brings poverty into the heart of our existence as a measure of living together, as a basis for ethics. Bare existence is turned into a choice to live differently. As the voiceover relates, the inhabitants of the district are not forced to leave; instead, they choose to do so, since they in fact have never really intended to settle there, instead considering it a stopover. Yang affirms the presence of the poor as well as their way of relating to each other by comparing them to the wind. Like the wind, their lives resonate not through their bodies or property but their silent, invisible movement. The richness lies in this movement. In another work, the domestic appliances in Yang’s own kitchen are abstracted into a sculptural environment following the same logic. Both the notions of property and instrumentality are kept on hold by this act. In turn, A Series of Vulnerable Arrangements: Voice and Wind becomes a temporary space, another stopover for those who choose to accommodate poverty in their lives. Here the poor will meet the poor during this lavish event and examine whether such stark differences can co-exist. Binna Choi