Basic to Gained Cha’s set up follow is the thought of web sites. Websites as temporal-spatial realizations of locations that wander, carrying traces and information of the earlier websites and the locations the place they have been realized with them in every new incarnation. The result’s a creative follow that feeds by itself historical past, brazenly displays its continuities and ruptures, however however stays open to new traces of questioning and types of engagement. This dynamic, ongoing work can completely adapt, change or re-contextualize its particular person elements. Within the case of the exhibition “our bone s milk coal,” a brand new set of questions unfold. By a number of visits to the Bochum mining archives, one of many predominant sources of sparsely documented Korean mining historical past of the Ruhr space (1960-1980), Cha labored inside and in opposition to the constraints of the archive to weave collectively historic supplies encountered throughout the archives and household tales of affection and wrestle in a post-war South Korea. Cha got here throughout remarkably few photos and private accounts of Korean visitor employees throughout his time within the archives, a priority that’s mirrored within the exhibition. One other is the executive depersonalisation of the employees, whose names have been first translated phonetically after which transferred to manage or course of numbers. The numbers taken from archival information are a leitmotif all through the exhibition till they type a physique in Miss Korea of the Ruhr Valley in a twisted reversal of their precise abstracting operate. Inside the erected website, the discovered archive materials is linked to Cha’s household historical past, which, characterised by starvation, love, and repression, additionally tells of the soiled foundations on which South Korea’s present prosperity relies. Specifically, the seven-part work The Idea of Time Components 1-7 exhibits how Cha weaves his household historical past into different contexts by permitting the person frames to merge into different installations, a few of that are composed of disparate materials, thus amalgamating totally different historic ranges.

at Neue Essener Kunstverein
till February 4, 2024