VITRINE Residency Exhibition

VITRINE residency offers four artists‚ with cross-disciplinary practices, the space, support and opportunity to make work towards an exhibition at the gallery in August 2014. Artists-in-residence Eleni Bagaki, Stephane Blumer, Heena Kim and Soomeen Kim have diverse practices yet their proposals had elements of responding in-situ while continuing to explore independent narratives.

Conversations about the local, its people, history, symbols and inevitably its transformation are starting points of the exhibition. The exhibition reveals how they develop this narrative over the residency.

Bagaki's work moves between the aesthetics of the sublime and the mundane, the banality of everyday objects, consumerism and Internet culture. She is interested in the process of how an image becomes a symbol, through circulation and recycling. She questions the way we look at the plethora of images found in mass media, and its relation to traditional forms of art making.

Blumer addresses the zone of conflict between individuality and society. His practice puts at stake personal and cultural conventions by investigating language and its shortcomings such as self-censorship and humour. His works are congruencies between what is easily thought and strenuous to express, and what is unthinkable yet effortlessly exposed.

Heena Kim's work is concerned with the omnipresent idea, something always happening behind our sight. Her work reenacts a constructed narrative based on learned assumptions instead of didactic facts. Her puzzles of paintings and objects highlight connections between those disruptive moments and conflicts that are a constant event in life; be it relationships, society or culture.

While, Soomeen Kim, quite literally, picks up fragments of a built society. She collects discarded, forgotten, inconspicuous construction objects and shed light on their efforts, aesthetics, layers and histories. By doing so, she suggests their significance as metaphors of social bodies or structures. Her practice has an element of ritual, the daily walks to collect remnants of an over powering industry, the daily treatment of these objects to build them up to their position on a pedestal.

Curated by Mary George