Candice Lin : Un corps blanc exquis / A Hard White Body — Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 6 → December 23, 2017

“A Hard White Body” infests Bétonsalon’s space with a pro­lif­er­ating, living, liquid and smelly instal­la­tion that con­sists of a fragile entropic bed­room made of unfired moist porce­lain. The exhi­bi­tion con­siders the dis­place­ment of bod­ies—human and non—through exam­ining the his­to­ries of porce­lain, plants, and people. It con­nects the tra­jec­to­ries of the African-American author James Baldwin during his 1950s time in Paris, and that of the French botanist Jeanne Baret, the first woman to cir­cum­nav­i­gate the globe in Bougainville’s 1766-1769 expe­di­tion.

Candice Lin, Calçon en porcelaine pour Un corps blanc exquis, 2017 Courtesy of the artist.

The exhi­bi­tion ques­tions the fixity of iden­tity and exam­ines the porosity of inter­sec­tions between race, gender, class and sex­u­ality, thinking about how this per­me­ability serves as modes of sur­vival, access, secrecy or shaming. Lin stages con­tam­i­na­tion pro­cesses between organic and inor­ganic mate­rials and cre­ates unten­able sculp­tures and sit­u­a­tions that demand con­stant care­taking. She works with porce­lain, a mate­rial loaded with his­to­ries of exoti­cism, global trade, sci­en­tific study, the birth of virology, and racial­ized lan­guage around its purity, white­ness, and imper­vi­ous­ness to staining. Drawing on affect and desire, with sen­si­tivity towards the attrac­tive­ness and repul­sion of cer­tain smells and tex­tures, Candice Lin works on desta­bi­lizing estab­lished hier­ar­chies of bodies, matter, and meaning.

Candice Lin, Dessin au graphite de James Baldwin endormi à Istanbul, d’après une photo prise par Sedat Pakay, 2017 Courtesy of the artist.

“A Hard White Body” is pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.

Candice Lin’s exhi­bi­tion is com­pleted by a series of public pro­grams designed by Lotte Arndt in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Temporary Gallery, Cologne. They are spon­sored by Perspektive — Fund for Contemporary Art and Architecture, a pro­gram ini­ti­ated by the Bureau for Visual Arts of the Institut français Germany.

The exhi­bi­tion and its public pro­grams are taking place in the con­text of the 30th anniver­sary of the death of James Baldwin (1924-1987).

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About Candice Lin: Candice Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University. Her work engages notions of gender, race and sex­u­ality, drawing from sci­en­tific the­o­ries, anthro­pology and queer theory. Lin’s work has been recently exhib­ited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LAXART, Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Delfina Foundation in London, and Akuna Zentroa/Alhondiga Bilbao, Spain with recent solo exhi­bi­tions at Gasworks (London) and Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). She is rep­re­sented by Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and Quadrado Azul in Porto. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Curated by Lotte Arndt and Lucas Morin