Exhibition Poster © AVPavillion

Are exhibitions a volatile medium? What difference does time create between a work from the past and the present? What kind of different contexts can be created if we bring back works from the past?

The Once Is Not Enough exhibition started from the suggestion that eleven artists present one of their past works. Some of the pieces shown have already been displayed in other exhibitions and others have not had an opportunity to be introduced to the public yet. These works include a work from ten years ago and a work from last year. These works that have been kept in storage, at the end of a bookshelf, on a computer, been in someone else’s hands, or just existed as memories, are brought together at the Audio Visual Pavilion from the end of spring to the beginning of summer this year.

To revive these works means facing the question of how to bring back experiences and how to rearrange the pieces within a new space. However, the objects are not all that is made present within this new space, they also encapsulate their times and places of production. What stories might these past works have for us? Can they be like ghosts who come back with stories left to tell as long as we are willing to witness the repetition of the same event while still recognizing that time passes and changes linearly?

For this exhibition, each work is combined with a story as a means of making these aforementioned past experiences present. Each story is a unique text that offers insight into the work, shows some of its veiled backgrounds, or reflects the form of the work. They operate as satellites orbiting either close to the work or from a distance based on the interface they establish. These texts, along with the narrow and wide orbits they form, will be published and introduced within the exhibition.

The exhibition adopts a structure that combines and parallels two forms of engagement -reading books and appreciating art works. From the toenmaru (narrow wooden porch) to the room opposite to it, from sound to memory, one can witness diverse temporalities being organized by eyes zigzagging from work to work, from one page to another. Through the book, the works repeatedly appear and jump over the walls of the exhibition space and in this way the works call for insistent memories. Here, within this framework, the increasingly common modes of production that constantly require something new pause for a moment.

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