Garden Tent | Booth G20
Wednesday 21 November 2023 (Preview)
Thursday 22 – Sunday 26 November 2023
@ Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi
El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana)
Chung Seoyoung (b. 1964, Korea)
Emma Hart (b. 1974, UK)
Yunchul Kim (b. 1970, Korea)
Nicky Nodjoumi (b. 1942, Iran)
Jewyo Rhii (b. 1971, Korea)
Yangachi (b. 1970, Korea)
Barakat Contemporary is pleased to announce its participation in Abu Dhabi Art 2023. Barakat Contemporary will showcase a comprehensive selection of important works by critically acclaimed Korean and international contemporary artists, with a special focus on Korean artists who are currently receiving much global spotlight.
The gallery's booth will highlight works by Korean contemporary artists who have been actively shaping the discourse around Korean contemporary art since the 1990s to the most current, dealing with urgent topics and innovative technologies. This includes Argos (2018) by Yunchul Kim, an awardee of the Collide International Award at CERN for his investigation into the artistic potential of fluid dynamics and metamaterials, and also a represented artist of the 2022 Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion.
Also on view will be the pioneering media artist Yangachi's Galaxy Express (2020), a single-channel video created with thermal imaging and LiDAR technology. This representative work reflects his artistic interest in using the latest technology as an expansive medium allowing for communication with other universes and disparate technologies. The LiDAR technology in particular disrupts the realm of perception as we know it, creating images filmed through data alone, without a lens. It portrays a cityscape through a "network of things," a landscape in which nature, people, animals, and artifacts are all implicated, whose existence as a subject will lead us to the question of true connectivity. Having exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nam June Paik Art Center, and numerous other institutions and international biennales, Yangachi has delved into the territory and essence of media art over the past 20 years and critically explored its underlying depths of social, cultural, and political influences.
The selection also includes exceptional works of sculptor Chung Seoyoung best known for her contribution to transforming the Korean art scene into a venue for contemporary art in the 1990s and has been leaving enduring imprints on its art history. The booth will feature a curated selection of works such as Corner Stone (2006-2011) and Walnut** (2020) which introduces the full range of her sculptural investigation on sociohistorial byproducts and conceptual rigor.
Barakat Contemporary's presentation for Abu Dhabi Art will also devote a special section of the booth to highlight the contemporary artist Jewyo Rhii. The display includes the newest work Love Letter Metal (2023) from her Typewriter series (2010-), an aluminum cast of Love Letter (2011) originally made in wood. Love Letter, like her other Typewriters, is a storytelling device activated by various bodily movements that convey personal narratives. The sculpture is accompanied by prototypical manual drawings centered around her project Love Your Depot_Turn Depot (2023) and Love Letter Metal (2023), a concise overview of her diverse practice, and powerful examples of the artist's various manifestations of her project as an open storage system that houses and displays artworks disregarded from the dominant art market logic. Jewyo Rhii held a major touring exhibition in 2013 at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, MMK, Frankfurt, and Van Abbemuseum, Amsterdam, and participated in the Istanbul and Venice Biennales (2007, 2016), and her recent solo show at the gallery in September has received ardent responses worldwide.
These works by some of today's most celebrated Korean artists will be exhibited alongside those by widely recognized international artists, including Of Realities and Illusion (2022) by El Anatsui, the Ghanaian-born artist who has achieved global recognition with his monumental bottle cap sculptures that reject the traditional conventions around sculptures**.** Reminiscent of a desolate land, the wooden panel piece that hangs at the heart of the booth is the artist's latest work that premiered in his solo exhibition at the gallery earlier this year - the presentation of this iconic work at the booth highlights the importance of the artist's work in contemporary art history, for both local and international art enthusiasts. Recently, the artist has been selected as one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2023 and was commissioned to create the annual large-scale Hyundai Commission at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall last month.
The highlight of the selection will be important drawings by Nicky Nodjoumi titled New York Times. Four decades after the Tehran exhibition that led to his exile in the USA, the artist still uses painting as his primary medium to speak up against authoritarian regimes and explore the relationship between power and violence. Energetic, oblique, with imbued anxiety and violence, Noudjoumi's New York Times series, which he used to read daily to improve his English and digest the world's affairs, speaks less to a singular political force but more of the means, mode, and positioning of inequality, force and systemic power through abstraction. The booth will also introduce Emma Hart, the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2016), and a suite of large-scale ceramic sculptures that question the power dynamics and how one's social background is transmitted through verbal signals and physical gestures.
Artists Biography:
El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana)
Currently working between Ghana and Nigeria, Anatsui's artworks are housed in many institutions including the Tate Modern, London; British Museum, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; and Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo. They have also been showcased at various international exhibitions including the 1990, 2007, and 2015 Venice Biennales and the 2012 Paris Triennale. Anatsui received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Chung Seoyoung (b. 1964, Korea)
Chung Seoyoung studied sculpture at Seoul National University and the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and lives and works in Seoul. She was a representative artist for the Korean Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale and has held solo exhibitions at the Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, Portikus Frankfurt, Germany; Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea; Atelier Hermès, Seoul, Korea; and the Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea. She has also participated in group exhibitions at the 4th and 7th Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Plateau, Seoul, Korea; The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Korea; Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; and the Hong Kong Arts Centre. She has been honored with the Kim Se-jung Sculpture Award, artist support from the state of Baden-Württemberg, and arts foundation support, and a number of her works are included in the collections of various public and national museums and institutions in South Korea, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Art Sonje Center, and Platform-L.
Emma Hart (b. 1974, UK)
Emma Hart works and lives in London. She is the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2016), as well as Visual Arts Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (2015). She studied Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, graduating with an MA (2004), and received a PhD degree in Fine Art at Kingston University (2013). She participated in group exhibitions at Somerset House (London, 2021); Künstlerhaus Dortmund (Dortmund, 2019); Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg, 2018); Government Art Collection (GAC, London, 2018, 2019); Arts Council Touring Exhibition (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2018); and The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, 2016). Major solo exhibitions include Banger (The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018); Mamma Mia! (Whitechapel Gallery, London, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2017); Love Life: Act 1 (with Jonathan Baldock, Peer Gallery, London, 2016); Giving It All That (Folkestone Triennial, Kent, 2014); Dirty Looks (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2013). Hart will be creating a permanent artwork for the primary public entrance of the new UCL East Pool Street West building, on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Yunchul Kim (b. 1970, Korea)
Yunchul Kim works internationally currently based in Seoul, Korea, having studied electronic music and media art in Korea and Germany respectively. He has been the recipient of a number of international awards, including the 2016 Collide Award from CERN, the world's largest particle physics research institute, and the VIDA 15.0 Third Prize. Kim participated in the Korean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale and his works have been presented by a number of renowned international organizations, including CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona), Spain; FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Frankfurt Museum of Art, Germany; International Triennial of New Media Art, Beijing, China; and the 6th Electrohype, Ystad Sweden. Kim was chief researcher of the research group Mattereality at the Transdisciplinary Research Program at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. He is a member of the art and science project group Fluid Skies as well as Liquid Things, an artistic research project at the Art and Science Department of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.
Nicky Nodjoumi (b. 1942, Iran)
Nicky Nodjoumi currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Earning a Bachelor's degree in Painting from Tehran University of Fine Arts before relocating to the United States in the late 1960s, Nodjoumi received his Master's degree in Fine Arts from The City College of New York in 1974. Nicky Nodjoumi's works are in several prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, and the National Museum of Cuba. Major exhibitions of the artist's work include those at the LA County Museum of Art (2018); Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015); and Cleveland Museum of Art (2014).
Jewyo Rhii (b. 1971, Korea)
Jewyo Rhii's major solo exhibition toured in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt, and Art Sonje Center, Seoul in 2013, and also held solo exhibitions at the Korean Cultural Centre UK and Queens Museum, New York. Her works were also exhibited in the 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, Queens Museum, New York, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Aachen, MMK, Frankfurt, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Campbelltown Art Center, Campbelltown, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, REDCAT, Los Angeles, and many more. She was awarded the 2019 Korea Artist Prize, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.
Yangachi (b. 1970, Korea)
Major exhibitions by the artist include those at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2016, 2013, 2012, 2004), Seoul Media City Biennale (2010, 2018), Busan Biennale (2016), Gangwon Biennale (2018), Seoul Museum of Art (2015, 2016), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2018, 2011, 2010), ARKO Art Center (2017, 2020), and Nam June Park Art Center (2016, 2015, 2008), as well as many international exhibitions at art institutions and art events in France, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, the United States, and Chile. The artist was also the recipient of the Hermès Missulssang Award in 2010. Yangachi's works are currently housed in a number of prominent institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, and Amorepacific Museum of Art.
Date & Times
22–26 November 2023
Wednesday 22 – Sunday 26 November 2023
2–9pm
Location
Manarat Al Saadiyat
Saadiyat Cultural District
Saadiyat Island