Close to Asia

Past Exhibition

Podbielski Contemporary proudly presenting:

Close to Asia

 

Leonora Hamill | Francesco Jodice | Thomas Jorion | Dubravka Vidovic

8th June 2013 – 31st August 2013

Podbielski Contemporary is pleased to announce the annual Summer Group Show entitled Close to Asia.

Based on the views of various mostly architectural impressions the exhibition shows different perspectives of abandonment in Asia. Contrary to widespread belief about the over-population and the booming growth in Asia, industrial sites or entire parts of cities lie fallow or have  demolition orders.

The work Meikyu, 2008, by Thomas Jorion (b. 1976, Paris/France), shows a former warehouse space in a limestone quarry in Aichi, Japan. Its pale color and strict division of space is striking. The viewer is leaded transversely through the empty space, so that his eye scans the emptiness. The deposits of calcium carbonate appear to be pale white, as the space is conserved in a time continuum.

In September 2013, we will present the first solo exhibition of photographs by Thomas Jorion in Berlin.

In contrast to the permanent emptiness of the space in Jorion’s works , the photograph Drawing I Hanoi, 2010, by Leonora Hamill (b. 1978, Paris/France) shows an abandoned room just left by students of the art academy in Hanoi, Vietnam. The drawing classroom is depicted as it was left, untouched. This creates a magic and haunting atmosphere of a kind of presence in absence. The color is also modest and the image shows a very geometric layout and exact vanishing points. The work is part of the series Art in Progress, which was initiated in 2008 and was awarded the H.S.B.C. prize for Photography in 2012.

The series of four photographs titled After the West, The Sleepers, 2011/2012, by Francesco Jodice (b. 1967, Naples/Italy), shows people that were leaving or have left. The photographs were taken in Hong Kong and Tokyo. The title perhaps indicates the reason for their loneliness. The implications of abandonment seem to be more explicit than in the previously described works. The technical accuracy of the works is clearly in contrast to what is depicted. The men receive an apparently unwanted attention, from which they seem to almost withdraw.

The artist Dubravka Vidovic (b. 1970, Zadar/Croatia) shows in her work Shukimen’s Walls Series, 2010/2011, the ruins of the historic district Shukimen in Shanghai, China. The district no longer exists because it was razed to the ground to leave space for modern residential buildings. The economic and social changes of modern, urban Shanghai demand new dwellings that displace the historical heritage of the city. The video Waterhouses, 2010/2011, in the second room highlights this disappearance in an allegorical way.

The artist will have her second solo show at Podbielski Contemporary Monte Verita in November 2013.