Candice Lin is presenting solo exhibition A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour at London’s Gasworks, opening September 21 and running to December 11.
The show will be the LA-based artist’s first in the UK. It explores histories of slavery and colonialism as it has been shaped by a human attraction to particular colours, tastes, textures and drugs. It focuses on how the desire to wear and consume preceded the will to trade commercial goods and traces the materialist urges at the root of colonial violence.
The artist presents a “low-tech installation”, or system, of tubing, plastic and glass containers, porcelain filters, hot plates, and other hacked household objects (boils, ferments, distills, dyes) and pumps liquid containing colonial trade goods such as cochineal, sugar and tea. Described as a “flayed circulatory system” and ‘fed’ two litres of water each day, the contraption will constantly produce a brownish-red fluid that will be collected in a basin, siphoned off, and congeal in a pool on a marble-like laminate floor in the adjacent gallery.
The organic matter produced echoes histories of trade, “transforming prized, historically-loaded goods into a stain reminiscent of murder, faeces or menstrual blood”.
See the Gasworks website for more details.**
