#skinships

[aumtriple-s]

. 🎧 노래 잘 들을게용 ~ #DavidOh #데이비드오 #skinships

[daakoda-blog]

TAEUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE TODAY'S EP.

[art-aficionado]

Skinships at Agora: See the Touch

The result of intense 1-month collaboration of Hyojung Ahn and Russell Perkins in the Agora studio, the project that conjures up with the senses in now exhibited at Agora in Neukölln.

On the face of it, the objects have a very clear instruction on how to interact with them: tactually, by touching. Would not you like to touch thickened gelatine (something I did when was small enough to play with food at the kitchen rather than to slave there) or feel the coolness of smooth grey stone? However, the idea of the exhibition was to trigger another sense – namely, sight, for Skinships are explicitly about visual experience of touch. Interestingly enough, none of the objects can be explored by three other senses – smell, taste and hearing; they are not supposed to. The objects are all static but for the video installation, which you can see round the corner at the artists’ studio at Kopfstrasse 48; but even that is silent.

One might say that the moment we substitute one sense for another is the moment we create a vicarious experience. By vicarious it is understood that the experience is not the genuine, but the fooling one. It is like looking at the ice-cream without eating it. Or hearing somebody gulping water without you tasting it yourself. The unusual way the objects are experienced also leaves a great deal of mystery. Was the gelatine ball warm or cold? Was it resilient, hard or slack? The sight gives much information about the object, but not enough, thus obscuring some of its features. What is compelling about the idea, is that the objects, once put into alien communicative context, start to acquire new features. I would go as far as to suggest that the objects with the new aspects start interacting with the environment differently. The particular piece of art that triggers further thoughts on the interaction subject is the transparent plastic board at the far left corner of the exhibition space.

The idea of playing with senses in perception of an art work- substituting one sense for another or boosting them, has started to being explored during the modernism, and became a major feature of the post-modern art.  For example, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose installations I find impressive and elegant, believes that “physical experience makes a much deeper impression than a purely intellectual encounter. I can explain to you what it’s like to feel cold, but I can also have you feel the cold yourself through my art”. 

It is not that I would compare visions and media of Eliasson and Anh and Perkins, for they draw on the concepts too different. If the former wishes to intensify the emotions, Ahn and Perkins are alternating and playing with them. And do it masterfully.

  Piece of art

  Agora Collective Berlin

[akobaril]

I am not a fan of skinships. If anything, I am very uncomfortable when people get all clingy to me.

They might not notice it because it's impolite to turn people down or reject them when they shower someone with affection. Thanks to the very few people who knows and shares the very same dilemma with me, I don't feel alone and weird anymore.