Curatorial Archive Abandoned Protocol

CHARLES DANBY

CURATORIAL PROJECTS ARCHIVE / ABANDONED PROTOCOL

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2007

ABANDONED PROTOCOL / 7 September - 29 September

Opening Reception: Friday September 6-8pm
Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm

Ritter/Zamet Gallery
2 Bear Gardens, London SE1 9ED

Artists:
Seung Woo Back, Hyung-Geun Park / Ben Judd, Kate Hawkins, Eloise Fornieles
(with support from the Korean Foundation)

Abandoned Protocol brings together artists from Korea and the UK through a primary discourse of photography that includes video and touches upon performance. Protocol offers a standard of behaviour, setting rules that govern syntax, and conventions that inform communication. The artists in Abandoned Protocol consider such codes of social exchange, turning to the periphery of cultural convention to question the social, political and economic implication of these systems. The works move through social - psychological - spaces, revealing in the poetical-uncanny of the landscape social codes that disclose considerations of environment and territory - terrains that exist on the margins of inhabited spaces.

Ben Judd’s video work I Will Heal You (2007) draws on an amalgamation of religious and quasi-religious belief systems experienced and investigated by the artist during a recent three-month residency in Cali, Colombia. Judd creates his Movement that is contradictory at every turn, questioning the channels through which social codes are created, authenticated, and come to stand as valid units of cultural currency. The duality of Judd’s ‘actual and fictitious’ Movement touches on a notion of discord that underpins the exhibition. Also shown are a series of Judd's stereoscopic photographs whose manufacture perpetuates primary systems of illusion within the medium of photography. Seung Woo Back’s photographs, taken at Aiins World theme park in Korea, mediate between a manufactured world of miniature replica buildings and a real world of lived-in apartment blocks, recasting the scale of each so that their differences are all but indiscernible. The opposing types of buildings stand as parallels to social and economic discrepancies between Korea and the West. Hyung-Geun Park’s photographs of uninhabited and familiar landscapes, ponds, graveyards, woodlands, have an intensive level of detail that renders their ordinariness uncanny, fantastical, and sinister. Behaviour, etiquette and hostility engender the collaborative work of Eloise Fornieles & Kate Hawkins. Their performance realised for film, Mal Gusto (2007) – a work first performed in Tel Aviv in 2005 - cuts directly to the superficiality of social event as played out through artworld encounter. The two protagonists emerge from a crowd to encircle each other with unbroken stares that create palpable tension. As matadorial encounter intensifies a violent standoff of unspoken conflict unfolds, and red wine spills…

Notes:

Seung Woo Back lives and works in Seoul and London and graduated from Middlesex University in 2005. Hyung-Geun Park lives and works in Seoul and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2006, recent exhibitions include a solo show at New Art Gallery Walsall, 2006. Ben Judd lives and works in London, he graduated from Goldsmiths in 1997, I Will Heal You (2007) was produced during a three-month residency in Cali, Colombia at the start of 2007, organised by Gasworks International Residency Programme. Eloise Fornieles and Kate Hawkins both graduated from the Slade in 2006 and began collaborating immediately afterwards. They both live and work in London; Mal Gusto (2007) was filmed from a performance that took place in End of the Peer, Paradise Row, London (2nd August/2007) having originally been conceived and performed as part of, Goods to Declare / MFA International, Tel Aviv, Israel 2006.

A 24 page catalogue will be available with texts by, Andrew Hunt, Keum-Hyun Han, Ian Jeffery and Skye Sherwin.

The exhibition has been curated by Charles Danby and I-MYU Projects (Jeongae Im and Eunbok Yu) with support from Ritter/Zamet and Arts Council Korea. Abandoned Protocol will tour to Seoul in 2008.

EXHIBITION IMAGES