ART CITIES:Basel-Geumhyung Jeong
In her practice as choreographer, dancer and performer Geumhyung Jeong constantly renegotiates the relationship between the human body and the objects that surround it. She has built up a collection of plain everyday objects upon which she bestows a bizarre, disconcerting life through an intense and risky interaction with her own body to challenge notions of sexuality, technology and the female body.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
At once tender and unsettling, the films, sculptures, installations, and performances of Geumhyung Jeong are often studies in animism of some sort. For “Homemade RC Toy” her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the South Korean artist focuses her attention on the erotics of technical animism. She creates a large-scale installation comprised of numerous robotic sculptures built from DIY technologies and short films demonstrating the strange choreographies to which she subjects her “homemade” bodies. Like so much of her work, the ensemble questions the boundaries. Geumhyung Jeong has from the very beginning explored the depths of the human-versus-other divide. Trained in dance, theater, and filmmaking, she began her career by making performances. The first of these involved attaching rubber face masks to different parts of her own shrouded, slowly writhing body or to moving electric vacuum cleaners, giving the dislocated heads eerie agency. In subsequent pieces she performed physical rehab maneuvers or CPR on medical dummies, but tenderly, almost erotically, as if attempting to bring these undead things to life. Eventually Jeong began creating installations to display her vast collection of facsimile body parts and related paraphernalia. She laid them out like archaeological artifacts: prosthetic devices, medical test specimens, sex toys, inflatable dolls, all arranged according to cate-gory or type. Accompanying videos juxtaposed infomercials describing the items with her own matter-of-fact demonstrations on how to use them. Thus, through different media, Jeong has been doggedly probing the relation- ship between her living, fleshly self and inanimate bodies, whole or in pieces, in a manner both captivating and strange. Whereas until now Jeong’s surrogate bodies were docile and lifeless, for her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition she focuses on the body’s active enmeshment with technologies, and on questions of control. Her new installation centers on five human-scale remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. They lie face-down, with rollers jutting out of their articulated jaws and rubber wheels for joints; the mess of visible wires circulating between their batteries appear to be veins and organs, while thick cables connect them to electrical outlets, like exaggerated umbilical cords. They are ungainly yet impressive, neither demonstrably male nor female, and neither very humanoid nor quite toy car. Unlike the spectacularly sophisticated tech devices on the market today, these freaky machines look like the work of a pre-digital-age amateur inventor, or the results of a teenage science experiment. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical- practice torsos, home repair parts (their Ace Hardware store labels intact). Some items are shiny, like new products for sale, and one gets the sense that the artist is fascinated with their practical beauty. Others are slightly battered from past experiments. Interspersed are silent informational videos that document the planning, building, and activation of Jeong’s technological offspring.
Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 3/5-11/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch
