BERLIN.- House of Egorn announces its inaugural exhibition Mapping in Memory. The new art space in the heart of Berlin puts a focus on emerging and mid-career artists from Latin America and Asia, and opens with a weekend of public events from 1–3 May. Located opposite the Neue Nationalgalerie, House of Egorn is home to a new generation of artists working at the crossroads of visual arts and performance. Mapping in Memory unveils new work by artists Yi Dai, Hyojun Hyun and Vivien Zhang and runs from 30 April to 6 June. The exhibition is curated by Angels Miralda.
Sharon Zhu, Director House of Egorn, said: “We created House of Egorn as a response to a need for a European home to a new generation of artists from the Far-East and 'Far-West' alike. The artists presented here today as part of Mapping in Memory are the first ones to have grown up in a fully globalised world. Post-internet art has been much talked about, but it might just be the art of post-globalisation that will give the clues to a closer understanding of today’s society. There is no better place than Berlin, Europe’s art hub where the encounter of East and West has great historic significance, to showcase the work of these artists.”
The overarching themes of the work unveiled at House of Egorn are Mapping and Memory. Both concepts are central to the organisation, perception and self-awareness of the world today. Mapping seeks to organise, to explain, and to render visible. It abstracts a city into a two-dimensional, bird’s-eye representation of a physical experience. Memory however is highly individual; it distorts, rearranges, focuses, and forgets. Experiences figure in our memory as bursts and fragments. The struggle to make sense of the world today can be described as the tension between objectively mapping and individually memorising reality.
All three artists presented here map the world in a different way and, unlike in bird’s-eye perspective, in their work exist personal elements and experiences, narratives, and individual fascination.
Yi Dai works with notions of chance, natural elements, and technological metaphors. Mapping in Memory shows for the first time a selection of works from her series In-Between Landscape (2013-2015), produced from train journeys through several countries. Using an iPhone camera, Dai captures the moving landscape once every 10 seconds. Each of these frames is printed onto translucent paper and acts as a physical pixel on the canvas. Arranged in rows and clouds, thousands of these pixels create a collage of landscapes that escapes temporality while implying motion.
Hyojun Hyun makes paintings inspired by the anonymous markings found throughout the dilapidated areas of European cities. He is drawn to places where the graffiti has peeled off and faded due to the changeable weather, creating abstract patterns reminiscent of different styles of painting. Hyun achieves the same effect in his works by recreating such scenes from memory, leading to surprising and unexpected effects. The works presented at Mapping in Memory are based on a collection of the artist’s personal memories of the cities Glasgow, Maastricht and Rotterdam.
Vivien Zhang’s art is marked by the use of repetition and misplacement. She challenges what may be recognised or mis-recognised in a work of art. Her paintings involve shapes and objects borrowed from a multitude of different places and disjoint cultures. Having moved to Nairobi and Bangkok from her hometown of Beijing at the age of ten, and now living in London, her work is concerned with uncertainty, misplacement, and a sense of belonging.
