There is nothing like a scary ghost story to lower the body's temperature from the heat effectively.
In the summer of 2019, one artist who participated in the group exhibition A Shiver in Search of a Spine at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL
saw a terrible ghost in an old castle in southern Germany. According to her testimony, the ghost she encountered appeared
in the most frightening form and unexpectedly eroded her daily life.
Strange things started to occur only towards the end of our stay there as if to soften us up slowly for the real event.
One day the door to the attic was suddenly locked from the other side, and the windows and doors in the apartment
would fly open without any perceivable wind. At night I would hear a strange knocking coming from the kitchen,
and the water pressure in the bathroom seemed to have a life of its own.
| Excerpt from the Artist Essay : A Shiver in Search of a Spine - Choosing a Room
More stories can be read in the artist's essay ‘Choosing Room’ from 『A Shiver in Search of a Spine』. Kasia FUDAKOWSKI (b. 1985),
the main character of this anecdote, Sol CALERO (b. 1982), Petrit HALILAJ (b. 1986), and Zora MANN (b. 1979) are German artists.
They all saw what should not be seen, witnessed what they did not want to see, and knew the fear of a situation unable to be
returned to its unseen condition. They drew us into unfamiliar experiences that split open a crack in daily life just like a ghost.
Sol CALERO saw architecture as a physical symbol of an organization’s establishment and a medium to trace the history of power.
Through La Escuela Del Sur, she explores how society borrows certain cultures to form governance structures of power.
Kasia FUDAKOWSKI’s Continuouslessness series reflects the absurdity of a social structure in which the responsibilities and individual
freedoms that a community demands from its citizens are overly controlled. After the civil war in Kosovo, Petrit HALILAJ found
doodles on students' desks at a ruined elementary school and made them into large installations, a series of Abetare.
He sheds light on the easily forgotten memories of individuals and presents hopes, aspirations, and dreams lost to war.
Zora MANN’s visual language, inspired by her childhood in Uganda and Kenya, unfolds the decorative patterns of indigenous
peoples in Africa and the existence of otherworldly and spiritual experiences behind them. Regardless of the context of the artwork,
her work encourages free interpretation and spiritual experiences. This stands out in Cosmophagy, a curtain made by recycling
discarded slippers, the biggest cause of pollution in the Indian Ocean. The four artists uniquely unravel the concept of community
and social structure in their respective works, such as important historical contexts of the past, reconstructed spaces,
and states of oblivion.
This publication is an exhibition catalog for the group exhibition
《A Shiver in Search of a Spine》 held from June 11 to October 5 2019 at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL.
