SPACE Aug 2024 (No. 681)
Installation view of Tropical sculptures: the possibility of impossibility (2024)
Top performers
On July 9, the exhibition ‘Tired Palm Trees’ opened at Art Sonje Center. ‘Tired Palm Trees’ is the third edition of the exhibition, following ‘Palm trees and perennials’ (2019) at Pavelhaus and ‘LES PALMIERS FATIGUÉS’ (2022) at Le Cube—independent art room in Rabat, Morocco. By adding Korean artists Shin Mijung and Jang Jongwan to the six artists who participated in the previous two exhibitions, this exhibition expands on the many symbolic images implied by the palm tree.
The palm tree symbolises Christian beliefs in peace and justice, the brutality of colonialism and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries in the global south from a postcolonial perspective, and the overexploitation of tropical forests from an ecological perspective. On the other hand, in advertising and interior design, palm trees are often used to give houses or cities a tropical and exotic atmosphere, or to give brands an environmentally friendly image. For instance, the first palm trees you see when arriving at Jeju International Airport were not originally native to Jeju Island, but were planted in the early 1980s when the island was being developed as a tourist destination.
This human desire to enjoy nature for its aesthetic value, without taking care of it, is what the exhibition highlights.
Top performers (2024) by Regula Dettwiler is a sculpture of a living plant with lace borders attached by rubber to the edges of a household plant. By placing artificial decorations on industrially mass-produced natural objects that are commonplace in everyday life, the piece criticises the commodification of nature and invites the audience to reflect on the artificiality and commercialisation of nature. The plant sculpture grows naturally and sheds its lace decorations, signifying the liberation of plants and revealing that man-enforced aesthetics are ephemeral.
Tropical sculptures: the possibility of impossibility (2024) by an El Salvadoran artist, Víctor Cruz & Hugo Portillo is an installation piece that reconstructs the form of a wooden palm tree using deconstructed materials from a palm tree such as wood and banana leaves. The reconstructed model of the palm tree is installed in the centre of The Ground on the first floor of Art Sonje Center, imbuing a unique atmosphere of a tropical region. Palm trees in tourist destinations around the world are alive, but like this palm tree model, they are removed from their original habitat, transported, and replanted.
In Seif Kousmate’s photographic research project Waha ةحاو series (2020 – 2024), which means oasis in Arabic, and Katrin Ströbel’s Ile de Gorée (2011), the ‘tired palm tree’ is extending its meaning to evoke, respectively, an oasis ecosystem destroyed by humans and slaves brought from the African continent to the Americas. Shin Mijung makes a comparison between Bam Island and the ‘Tired Palm Tree’. Bam Island: A Record of drifting images vol.1 (2022) by Shin Mijung is an archive film of Bam Island, which was lost during the urban development of Seoul in the twentieth century. Bam Island in the past formed a single island with Yeouido, home to about 400 people, but was blown up in Feb. 1968 to make way for the Yeouido Development Plan (covered in SPACE No. 29) and to improve the flow of the Hangang River. In the 1980s, Bam Island began to regain its island form, and in 1999 it was designated an ecological landscape conservation area and in 2012 a Ramsar Wetland site, where it remains uninhabited today. In the film work and Bam Island: Oral Records (2024), the artist documents the lives of individuals displaced by the bombing, showing that exploitation based on human desire does not only affect plants and nature. The exhibition will be on show until Aug. 4.
