CANDICE LIN - A HARD WHITE BODY

A Hard White Body infests Bétonsalon’s space with a proliferating, living, liquid and smelly installation that consists of a fragile entropic bedroom made of unfired moist porcelain. The exhibition considers the displacement of bodies—human and non—through examining the histories of porcelain, plants, and people. It connects the trajectories of the African-American author James Baldwin during his 1950s time in Paris, and that of the French botanist Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in Bougainville’s 1766-1769 expedition.

The exhibition questions the fixity of identity and examines the porosity of intersections between race, gender, class and sexuality, thinking about how this permeability serves as modes of survival, access, secrecy or shaming. Lin stages contamination processes between organic and inorganic materials and creates untenable sculptures and situations that demand constant caretaking. She works with porcelain, a material loaded with histories of exoticism, global trade, scientific study, the birth of virology, and racialized language around its purity, whiteness, and imperviousness to staining. Drawing on affect and desire, with sensitivity towards the attractiveness and repulsion of certain smells and textures, Candice Lin works on destabilizing established hierarchies of bodies, matter, and meaning. Candice Lin’s exhibition is completed by a series of public programs designed by Lotte Arndt in collaboration with Temporary Gallery, Cologne. They are sponsored by Perspektive - Fund for Contemporary Art and Architecture, a program initiated by the Bureau for Visual Arts of the Institut français Germany.

The exhibition and its public programs are taking place in the context of the 30th anniversary of the death of James Baldwin (1924-1987).

A Hard White Body is produced in collaboration with Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.