Kah Bee Chow, Ingrid Furre, Martyn Reynolds

Liquid Paper

Curated by Jóhan Martin Christiansen

INFORMATION

Artist(s): Kah Bee Chow, Ingrid Furre, Martyn Reynolds

Curator(s): Jóhan Martin Christiansen

Type: Exhibition

Location: Bonne Espérance

Dates: 23 Nov 2024 → 12 Jan 2025

Photographer: Malle Madsen

It so happens that you may come to be reminded of your own advanced age in unexpected ways. You gaze at an everyday object, of the kind that’s been following you throughout your whole life – without your ever having placed a question mark beside it or, moreover, without ever having taken its essential character into consideration – primarily in order to acknowledge that it’s about to be phased out. Recently, the doors in my apartment underwent a change. In connection with the doors being shifted, an electronic locking system was installed: a small chip that you slide across a surface in order to open the door. I took a look at the old worn-out key in my hand. And, for the very first time, I contemplated it as an object because its time was running out. Liquid Paper, an American brand of correction fluid, is one such phenomenon. Those of us who are a bit older can remember how one moved her/his way, with neat handwriting, down along the lined-off piece of paper, slowly and painstakingly. And then, just as one was nearing the bottom of the page, the pen might slip and leave a long and clumsy stroke in the midst of all this neatness. But this is something that could be fixed with a layer of correction fluid; and gingerly, we blew on the white lacquer in order to get it to dry faster, and then we continued. The good mark for orderly neatness was hereby rescued. I don’t know with any certainty, but I can assume that the mark for orderly neatness is also one of the phenomena that has been phased out with the advent and subsequent rise to prominence of the computer. Having at one time been a disciplinary measure, which was supposed to promote assiduity and painstakingness, it has today become an arbitrary aesthetic decree, utterly detached from the content on which one would otherwise expect to be examined and graded. Like the correction fluid and the metal key in my apartment, handwriting is a phenomenon whose value is being too sharply downgraded. It has become liquid. Liquid Paper is not so much a theme-based group show as it is a conversation about everything that’s flowing. About signs that are migrating from one sphere of meaning to another; about value that is slipping imperceptibly from the monetary and across the emotional to the aesthetic; and about materials that solidify, melt, flow and solidify again.

Author: Louise Steiwer