Variation for 16 Sliding Binders (How to Manage Time), 2024

Concrete, plaster, mdf (20x11x7cm), drawing on transparent paper, paper, metal mesh, aluminium plate, ocean blue water washable print ink 
Dimension variable



Exhibition view, “Pass Access” 2024
Photo: Sanghee Lee

 


























We often navigate the subway station as if in a somnambular state. Actually, we are not seeing anything, we are just intensely inward-looking: we are thinking of where we are going, of what we will do once outside. The subway is just a means to an end, a buried instrument that transports us to the different points of the surface we are directed to.

The same may happen in an office space, a place composed of many fittings and pieces of furniture, filled with objects, each of them made up of many parts. They are constantly under our field of vision and yet they remain invisible, because – while we are handling them, while we are leafing through them, while we are holding them, while we are thrashing them – we are not focusing on them. We are intellectually immersed in our actions, in our plans: all operations we need these objects for, but which leave them in the shadows like silent servants.

Bokyoung Jeong, in her work, deals with supporting structures, the objects that underpin our daily life without claiming attention. For this exhibition, she breaks the shackles that bound the sliding binder to the folder. She discharges it from its usual duty to see it as a pure form, to unearth its functionalities that lie dormant. In her hands, from a peripheral object it becomes the essential building block, the single line that repeated and modified can create an alphabet and a literature.

It is only in communication with a particular space that the sliding binder can express its potentialities. Here – in the subway AkademieGalerie – detached from its standard context, it can aim to the sculptural and the architectural. Magnified and cast in concrete, it reveals its play of concave and convex surfaces, of light and shadow, of materiality and recess. Pieces of paper will fold, curl and roll, nestled among sliding binders, forming a system of shelves; their soft and flexible materiality will reply to the hardness of their support. The process of arranging and re-arranging these elements has the power to manifest the surrounding spatial possibilities. They mime the space, respond to the space; they build variations. They create harmonies with the concrete ceiling, they articulate the white cube interior, they find mediations between the two. Entering the gallery is taking part in this corporeal dialogue. Walking the exhibition is a constant reframing of relations, a continuous redesigning of viable paths. Visitors engage in a choreography where supporting structures can finally affirm their individuality. For it is only in dialogue that we become individuals, as we are all defined and distinguishable by the connections we create with the environment. In conversation with others, we get to know them and by doing so we understand at last ourselves, bodies whose existence relies on structures paradoxically invisible. The re-appropriation of space and materiality Bokyoung Jeong leads us to is also a re- appropriation of time: it is to grasp the present that flows unnoticed and let it appear.

-Giulio Bogoni