Dylan Seh-Jin Kim
Curatorial
Maybe—map(ping) dissonance
NARS Foundation
22 November 2024 - 11 December 2024
Works by Jen Aitken, Sheyda Azar, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Béatrice Côté, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Ian Ha, Ali
Kaeini, Woojae Kim, Jung Won Lee, Jieun Lim, Letizia Scarpello, Sao Tanaka and Jeehee Yoo
Curated by Dylan Seh-Jin Kim
Programming:
Open Rehearsal: I hear a silent dissonance
Performances by Woojae Kim with collaborator Rahul Nair.
23 November 2024 at 6PM & 6 December 2024 at 7PM
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Maybe—map(ping) dissonance, an exhibition featuring the
Season IV, 2024 International Residency Artists Ali Kaeini, Béatrice Côté, Ian Ha, Jen Aitken, Jieun Lim,
Jeehee Yoo, Jung Won Lee, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Letizia Scarpello, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Sao Tanaka,
Sheyda Azar, and Woojae Kim.
Map(ping) dissonance. The term map, as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus, embodies a dynamic, open phenomena that consists of multiple lines of entry and cultivates
connections across fields. This nonhierarchical denomination, that is “detachable, reversible, susceptible
to constant modification,”1 offers a framework for the works of the artists in residence. The works
encompass this cartographic exercise with a functionality akin to maps that ping, or send a signal to,
planes of dissonance. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the map and the term ping are conjoined here as
map(ping) to indicate how the works as maps direct attention to a thing: the thing here being
dissonance. Dissonance refers to the cacophony of sound that fills our contemporary moment: the
spirited noise of the fight against evil; the compulsion to speak up and against; the visual noise of
spectacle and online junk detritus; and the incessant rhythm of capitalism. In Noise: The Political
Economy of Music, Jacques Attali shares, “By listening to noise, we can better understand where the
folly of humanity and its calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.”2 Noise
therefore serves as a reflective instrument to gauge our present social conditions and future
coordinates. The artists in the exhibition react to the conflicted noises of today and employ the process
of map(ping) to contemplate on our global dissonance, historical and present conflict, transitory
presence, landscape ideology, and material form.
To reconcile with today’s global dissonance wrought with climate anxiety, persistent genocide, war, and
polarized political climates, Woojae Kim and Letizia Scarpello offer forms of reconciliation and
meditated acts through rehearsals of sonic dissonance and opaque newspaper imprints, respectively.
Sheyda Azar, Lafina Eptaminitaki, and Ali Kaeini grapple with generational conflict, broken histories,
and displacement by directing focus towards our historical conditions. Through installation and painting
as modes of reflection, Jieun Lim, Jung Won Lee, Ian Ha, and Béatrice Côté track the dissonance of
memory that accompanies transitory presence as explorers, witnesses, and collectors. Sao Tanaka and
Jeehee Yoo propose fabrications of imagined landscapes to ping ideological frameworks that inform
East Asian painting traditions. By bearing witness to their own respective methodologies, Jen Aitken and
Philippe Caron Lefebvre draw processes of becoming to reveal the friction amongst material form.
Together and on their own terms, this season’s artists signal the incongruous nature in their respective
fields to make sense of our current entangled reality. They point to the unharmonious chords that layer
our everyday life and occur when we resist openness and too quickly embrace finality, purity, and
enclosure.
Maybe. Fred Moten writes on the deliberate kind of failure attempted in his essays of Black and Blur, an
“unremitting” predication, “Constant escape is an ode to impurity, an obliteration of the last word. We
remain to insist upon this errant, interstitial insistence, an activity that is, from the perspective that
believes in perspective, at best, occult and, at worst, obscene.”3 This refusal to be fixed—to remain fluid,
elusive, unceasing—and to embrace space that resists a final categorization espouses a certain
multiplicity to unravel the fixed conditions of our residency group exhibition and respect the artists’
practices here. Rather than suggesting total rigidity over the works in constellation, the residency
exhibition goes against its fixed conditions—of residency, of gallery, and of final curatorial
determination—to open up space for the works to exist in multiplicity, in complexity, and in a perpetual
process of becoming. This tendency for openness saturates the conceptual framework, offering
judgment by your, the viewer’s, discretion. Maybe, here is a map(ping) of dissonance; maybe, here there
is more to unravel.
Over the period of the exhibition, works in Maybe—map(ping) dissonance are displayed serially through
several installations, which is made visible by the installation traces and markings in the gallery. By
resisting a final categorization and embracing multiple forms, the exhibition allows the works to exist in
a polyrhythm and the public to bear witness to the exhibition’s process of becoming, and
simultaneously, multiplicity. Two interventions take place when the works are moved from one
installation to another.
The first installation of works occurs from November 22, 2024 to November 28, 2024.
The second occurs from November 29, 2024 to December 5, 2024.
And, the third occurs from December 6, 2024 to December 11, 2024.
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.
2 Caleb Kelly, ed., Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 90.
3 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), vii.