Works > Bone On Bone Echoing (2023)
Solo Exibition at Sauers Berlin
A true echo is the single reflection of a sound source. It is somewhat the ghost, the copy, the shadow of the original release. Nevertheless, an echo doesn’t dare to impose the concept of binarity: it doesn’t build a single pair or exist solely in twosomes. Rather the echo materializes in a sequence of waves—not denying the doubling of itself. If enough reflectors are present, the echo will multiply.
Being interested in this inalienable connection in plurality, Kay Yoon apprehends rituals as a response to the seeking of union and love. Even though the rituals comforting effect would be a welcome relief, the artist is suspicious of that promise. A certain form of institutionalization, control and abuse seems to be infiltrating the ceremonies core. Seeing the labor that goes into these rituals, Kay Yoon is attentive to its materials: symbols like the egg, bowls, bells, and rice (in various states) resemble within her sculptural instillations. Coming together in a leaking composition, the materials and their functions become observable, yet abstracted.
In Korea, the different purities of the rice wine implicate the families class background: the transparent sake is more expensive than the misty rise wine. With the use of rather cloudy, not so much fully transparent textures, Kay Yoon examines the implicated class indifferences within these rituals, and beyond. The door in her work stands in for a domestic memory that is allowing and controlling access to past emotions as well as experiences. Stating the violent potence that comes with the tradition of ceremonies, held in the circle of the family, Kay Yoon is concerned with finding a way to complicate her role and experience within these structures of tradition, family, culture—trying to exist within this echo, within this contraction.
By questioning the linear conception of time, Kay Yoon investigates other notions of remembering. Thinking through parallelities and multiverses, the artist proposes memory to be complex by implicating there is not only “one right” telling of a life story as well as a historicization of a collective h/History. With that, memory becomes fluid. It is leaking. It becomes fiction. And finally, the other side of memory sacrifices itself.
Text by Gina Merz
Organizer: Mark Willy Kellermann Artist: Kay Yoon
Graphic: Elliot Frydenberg
Text: Gina Merz
Performers: Bennedict Flinn, Max James
Video: Barry L Horvath