For Taipei Dangdai 2024, Zilberman proposes a presentation of works by Omar Barquet, Guido Casaretto, Sim Chi Yin, Isaac Chong Wai, Jaffa Lam Laam, Yaşam Şaşmazer and Lucia Tallová. By bringing together seven artists based in different geographies, the proposed exhibition delves into the relationship among tradition, society and the individual, taking personal stories as a vantage point. Through a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, and installation, this curated show offers new ways of understanding the realities of conflict, power structures and social taboos through multi-vocal artistic practices.
Omar Barquet’s works predominantly refer to space, time, landscape, sound, nature and memory investigating emotional and internal human chaos within. The particularity of his work stems from his ability to understand the nature of space in a technical, analytical way which relates movement and repetition, visibility and invisibility. Barquet modifies his source of inspirations in his words “in a way of ‘collage’ for the purpose of giving the projects a synthetic language” thereby bringing an interdisciplinary aspect to it, using a "symphony" as a system to organize all his projects and collaborations.
The first encounter with Guido Casaretto’s works is a transference experience of a visual sensation to a haptic one. With each work witnessing the many processes and steps of its production, Casaretto’s meticulous crafting builds up the physicality and tactility of producing them, especially apparent in the exaggerated dimensions of some. His experimentation with materials, such as concrete, skin, soil, and epoxy, is the spine for his body of works: the materials not only determine the outcome by a deliberate imitation of their nature, they are also heavy with the historical, art historical and technological connotations.
Sim Chi Yin’s research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory and extraction. Sim completed her degree on Cold War history and was active in the migrant worker rights movement in Singapore using photography and media for advocacy.
The conceptual, political, and performative qualities of Isaac Chong Wai’s practice are incorporated by an interdisciplinary approach, processing the exigency of societal shifts and global phenomena. His subtle, poetic, and yet critical works infiltrate the systems of meanings, inviting viewers to reexamine his edited representations of the body, powerlessness, violence, collectivism, leaderlessness, and mourning—among other themes.
Jaffa Lam Laam is a Hong Kong-based artist specializing in large-scale, site-specific and mixed-media works, often making use of recycled materials, such as crate wood, old furniture, abandoned metal and umbrella fabric. Since 1999, in her “Micro Economic” and other public/community projects, she has been connecting heritage and current affairs, and representing ordinary people through non-narrative and dialogical installations.
In her works focusing on the effects of certain socio-psychological conditions on individuals, Yaşam Şaşmazerquestions the good and bad in people, their bright and dark sides, the societal roles, and the clichés related to identity and cultural constructs. While she constructed these features of human nature through wooden sculptures of children in her early works, in time, her investigation has moved towards bodies of adults. These uncanny characters she produced with her material of choice, in this case, wood, refer to the eerie and dark sides of being a child/human. The dichotomies intrinsic to human nature, the inner darkness, the tendency to violence, and the processes of self-discovery, are merged with the concepts of shadow, doppelgänger and metanoia as expressions of fear and angst, creating both fictional and autobiographical characters. In her current works, she tackles the specific relationship between mankind and nature, focusing on its contradictions and malfunctions; and she observes, through her faceless and anonymous characters, themes such as invasion, decay, ruins, remembrance, and transience of memories. Şaşmazer lives and works in Istanbul.
In her works, Lucia Tallová explores connections between different mediums, such as painting, photography, and sculpture in site-specific installations. Tallova deploys a distinctive method of applying and treating black acrylic paint on paper, using water to distribute the color and shape it into dreamy abstractions and evocative grayscale urban, suburban, and natural landscapes. The colorless fragments of industrial and city architectures in Tallova’s works evoke a sentimental nostalgia, which is reinforced through references to personal items, like a lace doily inherited from her grandparents, and objects or antiques collected during her working process. Steeped in memory, Tallova’s spatial configurations bring these various components together to find new poignancy in the clouds of memory.
