• Candice Lin: A Hard White Body
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    Candice Lin: A Hard White Body

    Candice Lin, detail from A Hard White Body, 2017, porcelain. Courtesy the artist.


    From September 6 to December 23, 2017
    Opening on September 5, 2017, 6-9 p.m.

    Curated by Lotte Arndt and Lucas Morin

    With A Hard White Body, Candice Lin weaves together two sto­ries that do not seem to allow for an obvious con­nec­tion. At first glance, the black American writer and social critic James Baldwin (1924–1987), and Jeanne Baret (1740–1807), French botanist and first woman to have sailed around the globe, appear to share only their ini­tials. Lin unites these two char­ac­ters who, despite two cen­turies of dis­tance, lived out desires that were allowed through dis­place­ment from their native lands. They nav­i­gated queer and racial­ized gender pre­sen­ta­tions that were pro­jected upon them and that at times they embraced.

    In her instal­la­tion, Candice Lin pro­duces a bed­room made of unfired porce­lain, inspired by James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, that she moistens with a dis­til­la­tion of piss, water from the Seine and medic­inal plants per­haps used by Jeanne Baret. Porcelain, this hard white body, evokes purity, white­ness and resis­tance to cracking or staining. An Orientalist object of desire, it was later used as a bac­te­ri­o­log­ical filter.

    Lin mixes porce­lain and pun­gent liq­uids, invoking his­to­ries of exoti­cism, virology and global trade, and raising the ques­tion of a racial­ized lan­guage. She stages pro­cesses of con­tam­i­na­tion between organic and inor­ganic mate­rials, cre­ating an unstable sculp­tural ecosystem that requires con­stant care­taking. Visitors are invited to phys­i­cally par­tic­i­pate.

    Download the exhi­bi­tion pub­li­ca­tion (BS n°22)

    Download the floor plan (BS n°22)

    A Hard White Body is pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Portikus, Frankfurt/Main and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.
    Candice Lin’s exhi­bi­tion is com­pleted by a series of public pro­grams con­ceived 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).

    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.