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Mass: REVITAL COHEN & TUUR VAN BALEN solo exhibition

Hong Kong— Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present Mass, the first solo exhibition of London-based artists Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen in Hong Kong, curated by David Ho Yeung Chan. The exhibition title alludes to the quantities and nature of the materials and labour used in industrial production. Mass also questions the spiritual presence of the matter on display and the exhibition as a ceremonial site that consecrates an art object with cultural capital.

Revital Cohen (b. 1981, Jerusalem, Israel) and Tuur Van Balen (b. 1981, Leuven, Belgium) work collaboratively producing objects, installations and films that examine relationships between industrial production, culture and politics. The works in the show are occupied with raw natural resources, processes of conversion, immaterial geologies, entropy and industrial language. Their long-term research surrounding the invisible links between mining in the Congo and the mass-production process of Chinese manufacturing explores “the processes of becoming between the excavated raw matter and replicable objects of desire in another reality.”

Cohen and Van Balen write, “The transformations of things across dreams and geologies, through planetary leaps as economic forces, push deep into the soil to unearth animal and mineral matter or look up towards mining the moon, in circular motions from ashes to gold to dust.”

The selection of artworks on view offers geopolitical readings of materials that comprise industrial objects and immaterial connections. Cohen and Van Balen reflect on the impact of industrialisation on the generation of the “curse of natural resources”, where the mass underneath the ground determines the lives of all above it. The exhibited works address, in the artists’ words, “tensions between manufactured landscapes and the landscapes of manufacturing”. The term “manufactured landscapes” refers to the transformation of raw materials into art objects (or an embodiment of artificial landscapes) of varying forms and media, shown side by side with remnants and personal recollections from the process of manufacturing. The artists’ interest lies in rerouting industrial supply chains and unearthing traces of ritual, meaning and impossible places within raw matter through cyclical transformations.

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