KESSELHAUS 

Haegue Yang
Silo of Silence – Clicked Core
10 September 2017 – 13 May 2018

Once a year, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art invites an artist to present a single work in the imposing, twenty-meter-high Boiler House. This year Haegue Yang is realising Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, her first institutional presentation in Berlin.

As a sculptor, Yang is known for her versatile use of materials as well as diverse working strategies, ranging from industrially mass-produced items to organic and immaterial elements such as scents or noises. While her sculptural method is often labor-intensive and thematizes a notion of craftsmanship, it also maintains ideas of the conceptual or metaphorical. For KINDL, Yang has chosen a signature material with which she has long experimented: Venetian blinds.

The Boiler House with its seemingly aesthetic details such as scars and traces from its previous use as part of a brewery is a typical post-industrial site that has now been repurposed as a cultural venue. Consisting of 154 Venetian blinds in black and blue, the large-scale blind installation Silo of Silence – Clicked Core evokes a large silo by referencing the physical site of the former industrial facility, yet also appears somewhat transcendental. While the cylindrical outer facade has a black check pattern, the inner spiral is entirely in cobalt blue, highlighted by florescent tubes and set in motion. With the blue implying selected graphic elements in a computer application which are clicked on to be modified, the inner core of Silo of Silence – Clicked Core is emblematic of the process of activation when switching something on. For the third time, Yang employs motor-controlled movements, but this time, instead of a choreographed movement of individual blinds, we witness a singular continuous rotation at a hypnotically slow speed. Silo of Silence – Clicked Core is a moving, cylindrical monolith, which loops, circles and overlays, causing a moiré of shapes and memories.

Curated by Andreas Fiedler