Triple Vita Nestings
June 30 - August 30, 2018
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
Installation view of Triple Vita Nestings, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2018
Photo: Carl Warner
Press release
Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings at the IMA marks the artist’s first institutional solo show in Australia after her participation in the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial (2015–2016) and the recent 21st Biennale of Sydney. Bringing together selected works from more than a decade of Yang’s practice, these pieces straddle seemingly opposing artistic legacies and aesthetics, between conceptual art strategies and materially-driven craft techniques, between industrial production and the handmade, and importantly for this exhibition, between figuration and abstraction. Yang’s work undoes these supposed binaries and creates immersive and imaginative experiences.
Triple Vita Nestings uses formal strategies—such as layering, doubling, splitting, and merging— to reveal how individual subjects are embedded in the lives, stories, and contexts of others. Multi-sensory environments, figurative forms, and voiceover narration evoke the biographies of real figures, as well as mythical or allegorical creatures, and self-reflexive ideas of alienation and neighbourliness. Though these stories and ideas may be distinct, they are not presented in isolation: each character nests inside another, representing our interwoven or parallel realities. Yang has drawn from biographies of historical figures, manifesting preexisting encounters among them or alternately drawing idiosyncratic parallels between seemingly unrelated figures. Yang’s point of view on history, literature, and personal experience empowers us to perceive nested sets, or relations, between otherwise disparate lives.
Triple Vita Nestings is presented in partnership with the 21st Biennale of Sydney, and is made possible with generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Korea Foundation and assistance from Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Exhibition program
Artist Talk: Haegue Yang:, July 26, 2018
Touring to:
Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand
December 1, 2018 – March 17, 2019
Exhibition program
Talks:
• Curator exhibition talk – Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings, March 3, 2019
• Curator talk – Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings, Feburary 23, 2019
• Artist talk – Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings, December 2, 2018
Film program:
Films on the themes of diaspora and dispersion with a focus on Asia, the political situation in North and South Korea, and stories of migration
• Dear Pyongyang (2005,
107 min., Japanese and Korean with English subtitles) by Yang Yong-hi, February 16, 2019
• A Journey to Primo Levi – The Legacy of an Auschwitz Survivor (2003, 90 min., Japanese with English sub- titles) by Hideya Kamakura, January 26, 2019
• Son nom de Venise
dans Calcutta désert (1975, 120 min., French with English subtitles) by Marguerite Duras, January 13, 2018
• India Song (1975, 115 min., French with English subtitles), January 12, 2019
• Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968, 188 min., Japanese with English subtitles) by Nagisa Ôshima, December 16, 2018
• The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010, 72 min., English) by Jane Jin Kaisen, December 15, 2018
• Strange Meetings (2017, 11 min., English), December 15, 2018
Exhibited works
Doubles and Halves – Events with Nameless Neighbors, 2009
Squandering Negative Spaces, 2004
The Story of a Bear-Lady in a Sand Cave, 2009
Umbra Creatures by Rockhole, 2017-2018