GROUP EXHIBITION

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to announce The Naturalists, a group exhibition that brings together work by Milena Bonilla, Yang Ah Ham, and Camila Rocha. In each of the artists’ work the definition of nature is decoded, exploring the way nature can function as an archive and witness and how the variable vocabularies and preconceptions of “the natural” serve as foundations of our definitions of time and history. The Naturalists starts with this framework of indexicality, underlining how the artificial traces of humanity impact nature and control our perception of and relationship to the environment. In this way, themes of institutional surveillance, control and militarism are filtered through the contemporary values and culture, bracketing humanity’s ongoing tension between civilization and nature.

In her installation An Enchanted Forest (2013-2014), Milena Bonilla explores the complex ecosystems found in the border areas between former cold war countries, focusing in particular on the area between Germany and the Czech Republic. Separated by the so-called “iron curtain” the borderlands between these two countries became default eco reserves protected from human development. Bonilla takes a compelling example of how boundaries affect wildlife focusing on a species of red deer that, twenty five years after the cold war barbed wire fences were removed, still do not cross over the border, suggesting a learned behavior based on human intervention. In her installation the artist uses video and a series of prints reconstituting the local landscape along the former “curtain” and by mapping the animals’ movement using cotton thread. Bonilla has also fabricated covers for two imaginary books about the influence of politics on nature in the region.

Yang Ah Ham’s video work Wilderness - within us - Socialized Nature (2013), looks at the phenomenon of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) separating North and South Korea. One of the largest inadvertent nature preserves in the world, the DMZ has become a haven for many species who thrive in the land that buffers the two warring countries. A highly unusual interstitial landscape, the DMZ is in many ways the world’s only “war ecosystem” existing in extreme isolation. Indeed, the DMZ is isolated not only vis-à-vis human intervention, but also in terms of its existence, remaining a kind of mythic place outside of time. Ham confronts this highly symbolic place showing us how different species of plants and animals resist the decades-long conflict on one of the world’s most critical borders.

Camila Rocha’s assemblage perfectly bridges the work of Bonilla and Ham. Rocha brings together plants and seeds together with her memories from places she has lived or traveled. Using living flora, collages, drawings, photographs and sometimes sound and smell she creates environments that remind us of the world kept outside the walls of the gallery space. Her illustration of nature is built taxonomically, marked by time and personal experience, building an index of the material world. Evolving throughout the duration of the exhibition, Rocha’s environments change every week with additions of seeds and other things sent to the gallery by the artist.