When Contents Become Form
When Contents Become Form
Arebyte Galley,
Hackney Wick
London.
Catalogue with text by artist and writer Ben Gooding
The 'press release' can appear as a veil to an exhibition,
condensing and compounding a set of thinking and testing knowledge, and references. As tools of enculturation they serve to reinforce the power relationship between gallery (artwork) and viewer. For the work, When Contents Become Form, the artist has shredded her collection of statements from London galleries, utilising resource and information as both material and subject.
A parody in itself, the work is first experienced as a dense cube of long shredded strips that hover above a black mirror, this illusion is challenged further when navigating the work as the eye is drawn through the space exposing its transparency. Drawing nearer the work snippets of words and images present as codes for the viewer to create their own narratives.
The work and indeed title,'When Content's become Form', is a reference to an exhibition originally presented in 1969 as “Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” and represented in 2013 under the title ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013” by The Fondazione Prada at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice 2013 in the Venice Bianale.
The exhibition was originally curated by Harold Szeemann and explored themes of curatorship and relationships between the artworks and eliminating the need for outside context. The exhibition became a dialectical field of encounter between the individual artists and the curator, between the event and the architecture.
