Press Release
IN LINES AND REALIGNMENTS
CURATED BY LUIZA TEIXEIRA DE FREITAS AND THOM O’NIONS
4 JULY – 26 SEPTEMBER
OPENING: WEDNESDAY, 3 JULY, 6:30-8:30PM
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present In Lines and Realignments, a group exhibition curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Thom O’Nions, taking place across both Simon Lee Gallery spaces, in London and in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong part of the exhibition brings together new works by Carla Zaccagnini and André Komatsu along with documentation of a work by Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles. The exhibition’s starting point is Meireles’ work O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux (The Sermon on the Mount: Let There Be Light), which took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1979 as a twenty-four hour performance event. This piece consists of a mirrored basement room with a floor covered in sandpaper, on the sandpaper sits a pile of 126,000 matchboxes watched over by a group of security guards. On the surfaces of the mirrors are phrases taken from the Sermon on the Mount, as described in the Gospel of Matthew. The work lies somewhere between a sculpture and a performance, its essential quality being its potential for activation, its latent sense of precariousness and imminent transformation.
The two exhibitions gather together a set of works around these ideas of suspended action, artwork that exists on the cusp of change or transformation. The works in the exhibition embody ideas of performance whilst simultaneously remaining fixed.
André Komatsu’s practice deals with a sense of measurement, how we construct systems of understanding and of quantification to help us deal with a disordered and ultimately chaotic world. Carla Zaccagnini’s work addresses our interaction with the world, extending the exhibition to the streets surrounding the gallery. The work proposes a different form of attention to street signs, finding moments of unintended meaning by removing letters from the street names. The piece is anchored in the gallery with a wall text and the viewer invited to take away a set of stickers for altering the nearby signs, suggesting an array of possibilities for re-imagining the texts of the city.
