Candice Lin. A Hard White Body

screen capture from http://www.betonsalon.net/IMG/pdf/bs22-final-complet.pdf
on January 31, 2018
image © we find wildness

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A Hard White Body is the title of CANDICE LIN‘s recent exhibition that took place at Bétonsalon in Paris from September 6, to December 23, 2017

CANDICE LIN’s recent show at Bétonsalon in Paris, titled A Hard White Body (Un corps blanc exquis), examines narratives of race, gender, class, and sexuality through the lives and stories of JAMES BALDWIN and JEANNE BARET, as well as through non-human actors, such as porcelain, plants, and glass. The installation includes a video on Lin’s research on plants, materials, and histories of their use in narratives of race and gender; research documents atop a short wall made of bricks; plants throughout the gallery; intricate drawings; and larger drawings that cover the windows of the gallery, occluding parts of the exhibition from the outside while introducing other elements to the inside, namely a life-size drawing of a white body with plants growing out of its stomach; a bed made of porcelain, and a filtration system.

Welcoming visitors at the entrance of the gallery is a urinal connected to a distillation system that processes urine from the urinal and combines it with distilled water and water from the nearby Seine River. Tubes cross the gallery walls, feeding into a set of sprinklers that every hour mist a room that is curtained off as if it were quarantined. The room is based on James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room and is replete with mugs, bottles, domestic debris, a bed—all made of unfired clay. In misting, the filtration system (further assisted by gallery workers who spray the room by hand daily) assures perpetual change, a resistance to permanence, to a fixed solid state. – Like Piss in Motion: Race, Gender, and Filtration Systems in the work of Candice Lin, DAN BUSTILLO for http://contemptorary.org/

The exhibition publication from which the above screencapture is coming from, is available online via http://www.betonsalon.net/IMG/pdf/bs22-final-complet.pdf

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