Jewyo Rhii – "Dear My Love, Anti-Capitalist"
20. 2. – 28. 3. 2015

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When entering Jewyo Rhii’s exhibitions, one easily gains the impression of looking at a random field of material improvisations and associations – assemblies of drawings with or without textual components and “devices” evidently made and compiled by hand. The devices are more or less simple machines that have to provide compensation in face of the centrally negotiated fragility and transience of the artistic subject-body: from cushions, supports, reinforcements, protective covers, warmth providers, and handles, all the way to veritable machines that must be grasped more than the others as communicative extensions of the body and mainly refer to the otherwise barely protected external contacts of the subject.

The machines never appear as variants of “typewriters” often found in recent exhibitions, unsteady stilt-like letter slings that print the walls, like coquettish primitivisms, Rhii enigmatically succeeds in not only lending insecure groping and technical inadequacy a form in them, but also the feverish seriousness of the will to survive – with any aid offered by the respective context. 

While the sketchiness of the drawings often lets them resemble an aesthetic of intimate diary entries, Rhii’s constructional elements – floors, plinths, supports, shelves, and the mentioned machines – seem to directly transfer the fragility to the experience of space. In a metaphorical sense, the visitors of her installations walk on thin ice, the instability of the spatial experience  is at times directly tangible.