Artist: Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw
Exhibition title: CLERKS’ QUARTERS: CAN THERE BE FORGIVENESS?
Venue: Ashley Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Date: September 27 – October 21, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ashley Berlin
Note: Exhibition plan can be found here
CLERKS’ QUARTERS: CAN THERE BE FORGIVENESS is the second iteration of a new scenographic exhi-bition platform by Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw. The first chapter was held as an evening of perfor-mance within an installation by Shaw at Bob’s Pogo Bar at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in March 2018.
The concurrent presentation at SOX, PLEDGE, is conceived as an annex to the exhibition at Ashley Berlin. A performance evening, ACTING PRESS: CLERKS’ QUARTERS II will take place on October 18th, 2018 at 8PM at Ashley Berlin.
Together, these three distinct moments present an enduring transformative setting and storyline for Shaw’s intri-cate stagings, which are an immersive but delineated scenography. Shaw stirs up the thematics surrounding the pioneering North American settler mythology, and expands its elements into realms of Protestant labour ethics, Roman Catholic notions of repentance and Buddhist practices of renunciation.
This second rendition of CLERKS’ QUARTERS looks towards familial, societal and devotional ideologies per-taining to guilt, acquiescence and reconciliation as a means of considering concepts of “forgiveness”. Shaw’s instal-lation is at once a confessional stall, museological display, and town square, highlighting the fallacy of intimacy, the permeability of truth, and power structures built through fabricating the seen and the unseen.
Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw (b. 1987 Edmonton, Canada) lives and works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include F-150 at Polansky Gallery in Prague (2018), Benevolent Nerves at 427 in Riga, Latvia (2018), and Vinegar Stone & The Language of Flowers at Towards, Toronto, Canada (2017). His work has been included in recent group exhibi-tions such as Clerks’ Quarters at KW – Bob’s Pogobar, Berlin (2018), At the End of the Game You Will Be Forgot-ten at Alyssa Davis Gallery, NYC (2018), and Jugend ist Trunkenheit Ohne Wein at Bikini Space, Basel (2018). Shaw graduated with a Master of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2016.
