Built like a memory at Tag Team

Artists: Bianca Bondi, Adam Cruces, Laurie Kang

Exhibition title: Built like a memory

Venue: Tag Team, Bergen, Norway

Date: November 3 – 19, 2017

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Tag Team, Bergen

Throughout October, the gallery rooms and workshop of Tag Team functioned as a studio space for Bianca Bondi, Adam Cruces, and Laurie Kang. The three artists were chosen through the online software tool Curatron, to participate in the residency-program run by Bergen’s new studio collective Aldea (formerly Flaggfabrikken).

During their stay, the artists have lived together at Christinegaard Hovedgaard in Sandviken. In the short month leading up to the exhibition, they have become familiar with both Bergen and each other. At the studio they have experimented with different techniques, based on the tools and materials that have been available to them. The result is Built like a memory, a group exhibition made in its entirety at Tag Team Studio.

Bondi, Cruces, and Kang, each in their own way, work with site-specific – or perhaps rather site-responsive – installations. In the galleries of Tag Team Studio, they have developed forms and structures that alternately adhere to, emphasize and change the architectural characteristics of the site. Kang has installed tall, cut-to-form steel studs in the center of one room, turning like a rotating spine alongside the room’s own beams. Reminiscent of a building in the midst of construction, they simultaneously feel like structures from long ago; small, delicate drawings are engraved and applied onto the metal, resembling graffiti. Cruces acutely places clay snakes around Tag Team’s interior – twisting around corners and pipes, and within his own sculptures. Bondi, similar to Kang, finds inspiration in architectural elements usually unseen. For this exhibition she constructed a glass tube system, derived from structural diagrams of the copper piping used in plumbing; these tubes appear to extend and grow out from the gallery wall. The glass tubes are thinner and smaller in size, underlining a certain fragility. Filled with blue-grey salt crystals they allude more to test tubes in a lab than sturdy piping.

Several of the pieces in the show also point towards places and environments outside the exhibition space. Cruces’ sculptures contain objects of particularly clear symbolic value. Each object he incorporates in his installations represent (and are often taken from) places he feels a sense of belonging to. Together they form allegorical sculptures, thematizing the idea of home. Bondi’s installation also approaches materials associatively; incorporating salted fur, wasps hanging from a soap molded packet, and a Chinese money plant: a foreign plant commonly found in Norwegian households, with a curious tale of migration, meant to attract wealth and prosperity.

While the objects used throughout the exhibition hold metaphoric and symbolic weight, equally important is each artists´ manipulation of the material itself. Bondi cultivates salt crystals that have been soaked into the objects of her installation. The salt changes the story the objects tell. She describes, “I imagine these elements as debris from the North Sea”. The inscriptions on Kang’s pillars make cold steel suddenly reminiscent of tattooed skin. Encountering Built like a Memory, we find ourselves at tipping points like this; situated in-between states.

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Bianca Bondi (b. 1986 in Johannesburg, South Africa) graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Paris-Cergy in 2012 obtaining her masters equivalent and at Wits University School of Arts, Johannesburg before that. Her work has recently been included in the 8th young sculpture Triennale, PO, and shown in venues such as Plato, Ostrava, CZ; Gallery Jose Luis de la Fuente, Santander, SP; New Jörg, Vienna, AT; Galerist, Istanbul, TR and Ujazdowski, Warsaw, PO. She was selected for La Bourse Revelations Emerige, which showcases the French emerging scene, in 2015. Recent solo projects include la Cité des Sciences in Paris and La Villa Belleville, Paris. Bianca lives and works in Paris, France.

Adam Cruces (b. 1985, Houston, Texas, USA) received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008, and his MFA in Art and Media from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in 2013. Cruces’ work has recently been exhibited at kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, LV; Helmhaus, Zurich, CH; Museo della Frutta, Turin, IT; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, DK; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, CH; and Berlin Biennale 9’s Fear of Content. He currently lives and works in Zurich, CH.

Laurie Kang (b. 1985, Toronto, Canada) works in photography, sculpture, installation and video. Kang has exhibited internationally at Topless, New York; The Power Plant Gallery, Cooper Cole, 8-11, The Loon, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Parisian Laundry, Montreal; Carl Louie, London, Canada; Quezon City, Philippines; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland; Camera Austria, Graz, Austria. Forthcoming exhibition sites include L’inconnue, Montreal; Gallery TPW, Toronto, Canada. She was recently artist in residence at Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada, and artist in residence at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, NY. Kang lives and works in Toronto and holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.