Description
Defamiliarizing Berlin - Korean Artist invites Berliners to look at the City through Outsider’s Eyes
Movable Point - A solo exhibition by Hyehyeon Kwon (SK)
Defamiliarizing the familiar, South Korean visual artist Hyehyeon Kwon presents a series of installation/ceramic and drawing works inspired by the signs, symbols, and maps that comprise Berlin’s urban informational grid.
WHAT: Movable Point - Solo exhibition by Hyehyeon Kwon
WHEN: October 12th-16th, 2021, Tuesday – Saturday, 14 - 19 h
WHERE: SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)
ARTIST: Hyehyeon Kwon (SK)
From the 12th to the 16th of October, 2021, SomoS presents Movable Point, the first exhibition by Hyehyeon Kwon in Berlin, featuring installation, ceramic works and drawings.
Movable Point showcases an installation of drawings and ceramic works produced by Hyehyeon during an extended residency at SomoS. Taking inspiration from the signs, landmarks, symbols and maps that comprise Berlin’s urban informational grid, the artist provides her own interpretation, making sense of her disorienting new surroundings assisted by the essential and returning symbol of the dot.
In this exhibition, Hyehyeon Kwon extends her ongoing interest in the idea of “home” into “place,” including considerations of belonging, migration and orientation. As critic Lee Dong-hyun observed, hers “is a new perception of place centered on non-physical media such as texts and images, rather than the traditional physical space where individual experiences are accumulated.”
As an outsider who recently arrived in an unfamiliar Berlin, with no access to the spoken language, Hyehyeon re-creates a "safe reality," rendering its symbols and icons unrecognizable. In an original use of the defamiliarization effect, ordinary city signs, such as those of the subway, supermarkets, public libraries, and traffic lights, are blown out of their original proportion to reappear as mutated shapes eventually. The distortion serves to produce a sort of contradiction. Indeed, the intention pursued by the artist is to confound the viewers in front of their cultural signs – an ironic way of enabling Berliners to view their urban environment with fresh eyes; to feel empathy with the “outsider;” and to consider what constitutes home.
