Balice Hertling project space
45 rue Ramponeau, Paris
organized by Full Haus
with: William Kaminski, Sowon Kwon, Becca Lieb, David Muenzer, Jeffrey Stuker
The works in Saigon Immolation evoke, compare, and reenact historical events as a way of positioning the identities of artist and viewer.
William Kaminski’s and Becca Lieb’s videos appropriate footage in which emotions are indirectly expressed.
Lieb and Kaminski triangulate their own identities through their vicarious experiences of the identities figured in their works. Kaminski’s Interview ‘94, 2015, is an animation of a video with former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante in which he obliquely defends his long-term heroin use. The animation composites the appropriated video with still photographs in which the artist recreates, frame by frame, Frusciante’s every pose. Lieb’s video, Panopticon of Pleasure, 2015, superimposes Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 video, I’m too sad to tell you, with Meg Ryan’s performance of a fake orgasm in the 1989 rom-com, When Harry Met Sally.
David Muenzer’s Sconces, 2013-ongoing, are illuminated sculptures resembling folded paper. The watermark on each Sconce incorporates motifs from the only-just-past: an avatar employed by Edwar Snowden, or the 2015 common application essay questions, used for admissions to American universities.
Sowon Kwon and Jeffrey Stuker evoke events with more distance. Kwon’s series of drawings, dongghab,
2003-ongoing, takes its title from the Korean concept of a social relation determined by the year of one’s birth. Each drawing’s title refers to a place, while each drawing’s text specifies an event that took place in 1963. Stuker’s My Metal Gullet, 2016, is an animation that depicts the LIP R148, the first European electronic watch, while describing the 1973 worker’s revolt in the factory where the watch was made.
Stuker’s description of his own artistic practice speaks to the exhibition as a whole: to connect—impossibly, enticingly—histories that in reality are always partial.