A video showing the yard of a country house feels strangely unfamiliar. Almost no one appears on the empty stage, yet the frames seem to stutter like an old film. The work was made from photographs taken one per minute over the course of a month, then played back in sequence at normal speed. A total of 43,200 photographs went into the 30-minute video, making it a labor-intensive undertaking. The time-lapse piece is titled "Passive Mech."
Gladstone Gallery in Hannam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, is presenting "One Day in Space," the first solo exhibition in Korea by British contemporary artist Ed Atkins. Atkins is an art-world star who has illuminated the loneliness and emptiness of modern life through video works built with computer graphics. Centered on the new video "Passive Mech," the show presents about 20 works that explore the relationship between photography and reality, along with family memory and its traces, across media including photography, relief, frottage (rubbing to take an impression) and assemblage (combining various objects).
The works unfold themes of creation and disappearance over the passage of time, memory and trace, and presence and absence. They draw on the perspectives and actions of the artist's family. Atkins, who visited Korea for the exhibition, said technology is not confined to scientific fields but refers to the various modes of expression produced by language and civilization. "This is work that examines how the things we want to express change depending on the technology," he said.
"Passive Mech" is a video work the artist shot after installing a cardboard stage in his yard himself. He placed a camera at the window of his daughter's room and recorded the view outside, one frame every minute. The running time is only about 30 minutes, but within the video the season shifts from winter to spring, and the stage collapses through the passage of time alone, without any particular outside force.
Photographs the artist selected from the shoot were also printed in various ways and hung in the exhibition space. The differing frames and printing methods set the atmosphere of rough, homemade objects against the refined conventions of the museum.
A frottage series traced from bed sheets also draws the eye. After his children left for school, the artist laid paper over the beds and rubbed the surface with graphite, transferring the creases and forms. The creases in the sheets remain, but the figures who had lain on them are nowhere to be seen. The traces left by a child's body stand in for presence.
An assemblage work, which gathers and reconfigures objects from the family's daily life such as a cereal box and animal flash cards, is also of interest. Objects and structures made and played with at home become records of personal memory as they are moved into the gallery. Atkins said the exhibition is an essay for thinking about time and reflecting on photography as a medium.
Atkins was born in Britain and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has held solo exhibitions at major museums worldwide, including MoMA PS1 in New York, the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The show is notable as the first opening exhibition Gladstone has mounted since relocating from Cheongdam-dong to Hannam-dong, after entering the Korean market in 2022. The exhibition runs through Oct. 31.