Introduction
Framing Spaces is an exhibition that presents various conceptions and interpretations of space as the framework for art accumulated over the course of three years. Following the online exhibition Your Floorplan (2020) and the newspaper exhibition Framing Floorplans (2021), Framing Spaces is situated in a tangible gallery and continues to examine the ways in which art is recontextualized, perceived, experienced, and interacted with through different framings. The exhibition shows a new body of works by Na Kim, inspired by the artworks of the participating artists, designers, architects, writer, and musician in the two previous exhibitions.
Participating artist(s): Na Kim & Liam Gillick, Goldin+Senneby, Seung-hye-Hong, Young-gyu Jang, Jidon Jeong, Jin and Park, Hyunseon Kang, Daum Kim, Markus Miessen, Dokho Shin, and Hyunjoon Yoo.
Using the term “floorplan” as a metaphor for representing the spatial cognition of each artist, Your Floorplan commissioned nine art practitioners—Liam Gillick, Goldin+Senneby, Seung-hye Hong, Young-gyu Jang, Jidon Jeong, Jin and Park, Hyunseon Kang, Daum Kim, and Hyunjoon Yoo—for new works that envisaged the online as a conceptual and abstract space, instead of a substitute for the “real,” and then presented their works online. In the following year, Framing Floorplans transferred the online exhibition into a printed rendition while considering paper as a space for art, and was distributed at many art institutions and bookstores to intervene in the physical space. Designed by Dokho Shin, Framing Floorplans manifested how the digitally represented artworks were translated to printed matter by conceptualizing time as its axis. It also includes a dialogue between the curator and the architect Markus Miessen about the online and offline as spaces.
In 2022, Framing Spaces aims to extend the questions of how art interfaces with different framings. Rather than merely placing the artworks in offline space, the exhibition invites Na Kim to add another layer of translation of space and seeks to interrogate the relation between art and the frame of art; the ways in which art is reconfigured when situated in different contexts of representation; how the viewer activates the way of seeing placed in a particular “here and now”; if an artwork would lose its aura, the origin of its creation, or it would operate autonomously with its intrinsic value, whether be it in online, as printed matter, or offline.
Having begun her career in graphic design, Na Kim takes the act of “editing” as her artistic practice. She translates the found materials into various formats with deliberately determined patterns, and creates a new narrative while transcending fields and boundaries. For this exhibition, Kim produces nine objects inspired by the previously created artworks of nine art practitioners and situates them in the gallery. Each object, which is colored and shaped differently—such as a frame shelf, folding screen, staircase, moving window, plinth, and site-specific facade window installation—demonstrates the ways in which Kim interprets each artist’s understanding of space and floorplans, functioning as the frames and support structures for the digitally formatted artworks that become materialized and objectified. Also, as her independent artworks, they represent the artist’s spatiotemporal interaction within a particular site and invite the audience to imagine how Kim’s objects and the referent works are related. With “editing,” furthermore, her work expands design literacy as visual language by adding the features including utility and sustainability.
In addition, Framing Spaces traces the previous two exhibitions by having them as referents. The artworks from the online exhibition are displayed at the einBuch.haus in a way that they can be approached and triggered only by the audience, whereas Your Floorplan was originally presented online nonlinearly and simultaneously. Corresponding with the context of the venue, both a gallery and bookstore that declares “a book is in the form of an exhibition,” Framing Floorplans, the printed exhibition, is also being distributed by the gallery for the first time in Berlin. By interweaving different framings of art and framing various artists’ ideas about space encompassing from the abstract to the substantial, Framing Spaces navigates the possibilities that the frames of art can present, and ultimately seeks to expand the notion of space-time and the ways of perceiving, experiencing, and interacting with art in this ever-changing world.