Installation view © Space 413

《a fist is a fist is a fist》 is a serial project that unfolds as two performances followed by an exhibition, focusing—much like the artist’s recent process—on the “fist,” the body’s extremity laden with multi-layered social meanings. Depending on the shape of a clenched hand, the place where it meets, and the attributes of its prefixes, the “fist” is dramatized or altered in character.

It becomes a space where joints bend and tangle, a plaza that gathers the directions indicated by each finger into a single point. As the title suggests, there are no capital letters here. We do not take the grip forged by a particular hand as truth. The memories of all hands are at once a priori and experiential.

Installation view © Space 413

Following the two performances, the remnants gather at Space 413, a renovated, standalone factory in Mullae. The venue bears a boldly unfamiliar structure, as if recording the trace of past events. Here, the exhibition leaves visual, tactile, and sonic marks and fragments from the previous performances. Through the performances, we generated two questions:

- As we pool into a single basin, what kinds of noise do we make as we condense? Where does the condensed assembly flow?
- Where do streams that deviate from their trajectory go? Must sensations that remain moist, avoiding absorption, ultimately be read as aporia?

In the process of voicing such large questions, the artist and curator approached the project as a kind of methodology for building narrative. The characters of streams that claim “subjectivity” seem to possess exaggerated traits of their own, yet at times they all flow into one basin, and after experiencing the same time and an unrefined commonality, they erupt in different directions. The destination of condensation–utterance draws in the remnants and fragments arising in between constant movement and individual desire, the potential for dismantling, and primordial attempts at conquest.

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