What is left in the wake of destruction - the flood of information?
Tungur// 舌头[Like an Open Book] was the fourth in the artist's TextBook Art series (2023 - 2024.) Exhibited in a small wooden house in CPI, Luxelakes, Chengdu, as a part of the artists six week residency A4 Residency Art Center and the Re-Create 2024 art festival, a collaboration of CPI and the A4 Residency Art Center.
The small house, furnished with furniture sourced from local Chengdu antique markets, and a bed of paper fortune-tellers created from textbooks: donations from a from a local university as well as a few from used bookstores and donations from community members.
A whimsical encounter with textbooks. An unreadable mass of information, put together through a shared memory - a familiar shape. A game. Creation as a form of recycling - or as destruction if we choose to think of it that way. Trash and art - art: a waste product of the knowledge economy. Unreadable nonsense.
The theme for the 2024 residency was "how to discuss sustainability sustainably?"
Art: the creator's non-answer.
A meditation on the limits of words, of knowing, of drowning people in data - the difficulty to convey ideas, feelings, that cut the closest to people's hearts. The important stuff. The messy stuff.
That mysterious thing inside people's hearts that don't always make it off the tongue.
It grows... and decays.
There are two new addition to this instalment of the TextBook Art Project compared to previous ones: A. That the books were donated, coming from a context that was un-connected to the artists, which had previously only "recycled" books that personally belonged to them, and B. Audience Participation - both sort of connect. The work starts to belong to others through the process. During the two weeks the exhibition was up, audiences were welcome to make their own paper fortune tellers from textbooks (from the bulk donated by the university) in a kind of work-shop-area when first entering the house. Visitors could keep what they made or contribute it to the work, adding theirs somewhere in the house, the only rule being that what they make touch another piece of paper, letting the installation, an organic-looking mass grow. Visitors could also place what they made in a basket provided, fortune-tellers placed in there were then tacked on to a canvas by the artists, working slowly day by day until completing the "painting" when the exhibition closed. A push and pull of ownership and authorship. Of organic growth and control by the artists. All paper fortune-tellers on the canvas made by the audience but arranged by the artists. Meanwhile, in a small wooden house by the lake, bombarded with visitors and participants of all ages - some not even human: spiders, frogs, the natural elements, the installation actually shrunk and decayed more than growing in the first week. Growing as it dissolved. A part of a process, of creation and(from) destruction. Outside the artists (or anyone's) control.
Memory Crease: 东南西北
no translation necessary
The title a deliberate mis-translation, the English subtitle having nothing to do with the Icelandic and Chinese word for Tongue, a reference to hearts, to previous work. People's hearts, like books, if opened can fall apart, and then what secrets come spilling out...?
The thing that won't make it off the tongue - like an open book taken a part, rearranged in a game. Through collective memory. A shared childhood experience. The connective tissue; even if the words don't make sense - and you can ask any student - none of it makes sense if you stare at a page long enough - that mysterious thing is understood. How many of those students ever though about destroying their school books? Doodled on them. Like a force of nature. Like a flood. Beyond language and cultural barriers, so human its actually animal - No translation necessary.
A very special thanks to all contributors to this works and to the A4 Residency Art Center for all their support.
Love, the artists,
-Saga Unn.
