ART CITIES:Gent-Nina Canell
Nina Canell’s sculptures and installations are the result of both chance encounters and careful observations. They generate dynamic connections between solid objects and elusive phenomena that together testify to what has happened or is happening. This mediation between stuff, substances and structures always leaves traces: from the distance that they travelled, the things they bumped into, or the time that passed through them.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive
Nina Canell in her solo exhibition “Energy Budget” at S.M.A.K. integrates the museum’s architecture, light and relationship with the outside environment, which influences the location of the sculptures and determines the transformation they undergo on site. The arrangements of objects, with their individual characteristics, in turn create a specific atmosphere by which the space is undeniably affected. In the only darkened space of the exhibition, a collaborative video reveals in detail the intoxicating complication of movement and stasis of a leopard slug and a number of dragon holes. In each “Gum Drag”, a threaded steel rod anchored to the floor serves as a support for the unpredictable behaviour of a column of mastic gum. Its sluggish form interacts with the atmospheric conditions of the room to produce an odd sentient sag, which slowly gives way throughout the duration of the exhibition. The movement is too slow for us to perceive in its entirety but our bodies can somehow sense it. Unlike the crawling gum, “Brief Syllables” lie idle on the room’s floor as literal interruptions. These findings consist of cut-off electricity, signaling and telecommunication cables that make energy transfers over immeasurable distances possible in a matter of seconds. Serving a society that is increasingly based on electrical power and frictionless networks, Canell pulls them out of the ground and sea to show them as raw fragments. These cable stumps seem like relics of an earlier, mechanical era: intriguing yet dysfunctional objects that display an armored cross-section, veined with conductive wire and insulated fillings. “Days of Inertia” is composed of puddles that display a strange sensitivity towards the uneven geometry of the stone tiles they inhabit. A nano-scaled hydrophobic coat contains the water’s surface tension as if holding or framing another dimension. Reflections of the immediate surroundings can be perceived in liquid detail, emerging and dispersing with our own movement as well as the shifting light conditions around it. The installation “Flexions” spreads out over three rooms, intermittently performing their small-scale gestures. Short, thin wires have been grouped and hung on the walls – wires that are sensitive towards the temperatures that activate their body language. The issue is that their tissue is forgetful. The wire itself is a metal alloy known as “memory wire”. When heated, this wire or “smart metal” remembers a shape by passing a low-voltage electrical current through it. If the current is switched off, the memory wire deforms and slackens under its own weight while heat dissipates “Energy Budget” is a new video produced in collaboration with Robin Watkins. It begins with a sequence of probing movements by a colossal leopard slug that orientates itself within an electrical switchboard of some kind. Its soft, gastropodous body crosses a fragmented topography of inputs and outputs, in turn revealing a staggering number of micro-movements in its muscular fluctuations. Navigating by way of sensors that detect light, humidity and smell, the slug plots a journey of transfers devoid of any synthesised electricity. The second sequence was filmed on location at Telegraph Bay, the area in Hong Kong where the first Asian subsea telegraphy cable landed in the early 20th Century. Working with a slow, motorized zoom lens the subject is drawn out of each shot, capturing only peripheral movements and revealing large gaps: empty frames as high and wide as houses. These gaps are known as “dragon holes” and are in fact precisely engineered passageways for dragons whose paths must not be blocked, despite the structural omission of real estate. Stemming from feng shui, these beliefs maintain that the ancient creature-spirits reside in the mountains behind the building, while they drink and bathe in the South China Sea on the other side of the facade. The video then takes us further, along Cyberport Road, to the less luxurious social housing blocks in the Wah Fu district. Here, the wind blows vertically through the high, geometrical shafts of a housing block, before freeing itself through the dilapidated porticoes at their foot.
Info: S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Duration: 23/6-2/9/18 Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://smak.be
