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

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Each of Rhii’s exhibitions also feeds on earlier arrangements, in part going back over several shows. “Dear My Love, Anti-Capitalist” is the title of the current format and the start of a letter that after years takes up an old love story. While back then it was already restrictive circumstances that forced the young lovers to secretly meet on the inhospitable banks of the Han River, where pure survival was at issue in face of the metaphorical and actual coldness, it is now the resonance of this fragile and yet intensive past, a reference that in an astounding manner places the language of love and the view of the world, private and political issues, in the very first line of a message. Placed at the entrance to the show as a drawing, the strangely rash and conspiratorial tone of the picture-letter, which the subject of the installation addresses to the loved one, sets the mood prevailing in the gallery.

This time, the central “device” is a “lecture machine”, as the artist calls it, that initially consists only of a kind of clumsily nailed shelter. Inside, there is a half-concealed, vertical cylinder of transparent plastic foil on an awkward rotation rack with a blue plastic hose wrapped around its base. It seems to be waiting for some kind of unwinding exertion of force. There are drawings hanging on the cylinder reminding one of a sales display for postcards or the like.

The pictures hanging there are contour drawings all referring to the same photograph also shown on the invitation card: Rhii in a suburban high-rise settlement with slightly disconcerting, quiet resolve walking up a ramp from a dilapidated base. At the opening, these pictures became the last warrants of a swerving talk that addressed her own origins and a great enigma.