interval in space. hong kong
beat feller, zilla leutenegger, matthias liechti, boris rebetez, judith fegerl, nadim abbas, au hoi lam, sarah lai, lee kit, kingsley ng
5. dezember – 28. februar 2018 osage art gallery, hong kong







„Our understanding of reality is reflected in the way we build and experience constructed space.“ Martin Heidegger

The exhibition brings together two groups of artists from Europe and Asia. Five artists from Switzerland/Austria have been invited to enter into dialogue with five artists from Hong Kong/Taiwan. ‚Interval in space‘ is the request. In our sense, interval can mean a formal or textual relationship as well as the spatiotemporal distance between two works, but it can also mean a subset of works related to the total amount. How would the invited artists define ‚interval in space‘? And how would they react and respond to one another?

The Swiss artists have been chosen by Janine Stoll and Harald Kraemer, the artists from Hong Kong by Agnes Lin and Charles Merewether. The exhibition will be shown in Nairs, Contemporary Art Center in Switzerland and at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong.

A long way has been taken from the classical idea of sculpture to the recent transmedia character of interventions in space. Nowadays sculpture means first of all acting or interacting in space. For the invited artists from Switzerland and Austria and the challenge is to respect the existing spatial situation by analyze it at the same time. So the result of their response can be an object or a system, an idea or a narrative.

The Hong Kong artists explore objects in space but often beginning with the domestic, the mundane and everyday. This is the point of departure. Recreating a living room, a bathroom or just a bed or a table their installations generate new narratives. Defined once as ’social sculpture‘, their installations fuse spatial design, paintings, everyday objects, sound to invoke the question of place and memory of the personal. They are immersive environments, often times creating a precarious relationship with reality, destablising a viewer’s perception of space, creating a precarious relationship with reality. In certain cases the work might playfully engage with kitsch or create a sense of estrangement with the familiar or to the contrary, forming quiet moments that escape the purview of the everyday, evoking calm and tranquility. The engagment of art with ordinary objects brings a poetry to the mundane, heightening the viewer’s sense of everyday life. Such practice belongs to a long tradition of engagement with everyday life but there in a new dimension to this contemporary manifestation.