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Haegue Yang: Vita Activa, at the Hayward Gallery

A couple of weeks ago we had Lee Bul vocalising without consonants; tomorrow we have Hague Yang, who represented Korea at the 2009 Venice Biennale, doing knitting and origami. You can’t say the Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School season is mainstream.

Haegue Yang: Vita Activa

Hayward Lecture Theatre
Saturday 7 July 2012

Haegue Yang: Vita Activa

Haegue Yang hosts a day-long workshop of knitting and origami. In the morning participants begin with a session of origami and then in the afternoon move on to knitting. The class undertake these activities alongside the artist and instructors from local knitting and origami associations.

Through the low-key activities carried out in small groups, the course explores how learning is ‘unfolded and woven amongst the participants’. By deliberately shunning ‘frontal lecturing’ and the ‘high pressure of productivity’ participants become involved in an exercise of domesticizing the institution’.

Yang has established a studio in Berlin that for the artist functions as a ‘micro or temporary community … which shares the modest process of creation as well as intimate and personal narratives.’ With this class she aims to extend this personal experience to members of the public.

Approximate duration: full day, each session approx three hours

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul, Korea)
Haegue Yang’s work involves what she calls the ‘condensation of communication’ and frequently makes allusions to political events and personages. The abstract forms and narratives that she creates in installations and sculptures are constructed from things found around the home, including venetian blinds, folding laundry racks, light bulbs and feather dusters. Yang’s installation 5, Rue Saint-Benoît, shown at the Hayward Gallery in 2010, examines the concept of private space as a site for personal and political struggle and survival. It takes its title from the Paris address of author Marguerite Duras, whose apartment became a meeting place for the Resistance during World War II. In her 2009 workshop, Shared Discovery of What We have and Know Already, a skill-sharing and knowledge exchange project in which paper folding and knitting were active ingredients, Yang again alluded to Duras – specifically her wartime work in the Vichy government’s Paper Allocation Agency, and her talent for DIY.

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(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.

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