Browsing Swiss Institute
world of yum yum
January twenty fifth – April 14th, 2024
big apple
In her first solo exhibition within the United States, Lorenza Longhi illuminates the inside of a fantasy division retailer with intense fluorescent lighting. The exhibition’s title, “World of Yum Yum,” is taken from Rhonda Lieberman’s essay “Glamour Wounds,” through which the phrase is used to explain the artist’s expertise with Chanel, who suffered from vivid nervousness assaults.・It is given as a nickname for the boutique. “The symbolic impact of the employees and merchandise mocking the accusers is that even when Coco or Karl Lagerfeld himself had been there watching me, I would not have felt as unhealthy,” Lieberman mentioned. Speaking in the course of “I used to be shocked to be so viscerally besieged by mere merchandise and officers who had been really ignoring me.” At the Swiss Institute, USM furnishings, constructing foyer, heat and coolness Longhi, a Zurich-based artist with a penchant for the nuances of lighting, takes up this determine with a disinterested and dominant gaze of the product, however quite than giving up on the viewer, a budget illusions and economics that gasoline paranoid consumption Resisting the spectacle of consumerism in an age of inequality and local weather disaster, she topics the objects of our collective aspirations to rigorous and unbiased interrogation.
Spy cameras and flowers are the twin topics of eight ink and wood-mounted digital prints suspended from the ceiling about 5 toes from the wall. Some of the high-definition prints embrace Lace Riot (all works 2024), which options flowers woven from tricolored thread with bead-like cameras instead of pistils, and huge felted perennials. “Obsessions” and so on. The aggressively magenta petals are divided into his two panels, offering an additional visible stimulation that’s virtually tactile. The star, in a portrait with darkish lenses atop a protracted deal with caught right into a Hello Kitty-branded lemonade can, evokes a way of three-dimensional house, solely to be subverted by a layer of ink. Eyeballs, his two panels that includes a grid of silver-outlined flower cams, recollects Andy Warhol’s high-contrast floral work of the Sixties.
For an exhibition in Rome in 2020, Longhi used plastic movie and cables to create an overhead set up known as a suspended ceiling that hid a part of the exhibition house’s unique construction. At the Swiss Institute, she as soon as once more incorporates an architectural addition, this time a makeshift frieze. The “frieze”, which is lined with white on one facet and patterned kraft paper on the opposite, is secured with silver tape to a tool that helps the wood panels and hides a few of the steel gear. This refined intervention connects the central ring of the exhibition, the place the viewer is “surrounded” by stimuli from all instructions, and the peripheral refuge, a backstage space the place solely the naked wooden of the symbolically opted-out panel is seen. It formally inscribes the division between stage of capitalist consumption. Looking at it one other manner, viewers who had been first proven the again of the panel had the choice to not opt-in within the first place.
Longhi not solely deconstructs the possibly alienating cultural expertise of buying, but in addition affords a type of resistance by her methodology. Using spy cameras, Longhi is taking part in what Canadian engineer Steve Mann calls “surveillance,” a time period used to explain the act of “surveilling from under.” Traditional top-down surveillance offers typically hen’s-eye entry to what Lieberman calls “officers,” akin to safety guards and salespeople who monitor consumers and shoplifting suspects. According to Mann, sousveillance, which reverses the hierarchy, is extra like “a consumer taking a photograph of a retailer proprietor.” The dangers of recording a pop track performed in a division retailer are actually decrease than the dangers of eavesdropping or leaking state secrets and techniques, however the truth that Longhi is so keen to mix retail and espionage on this exhibition means that one thing is occurring at a boutique or shopping center. A sq. the place our intimate wishes mingle with these of others. The “world of Yum Yum” in Lieberman’s essay could perform overtly as an area of exclusion, nevertheless it additionally displays the fantasies and wishes of capitalism, the place consumers are humble prospects and eternally transitory beings. The total theater equally simply enforces rampant norms of acceptability. Just present is usually a violation. In his essay, Lieberman quips that we must always heal wounds by possessing and merging hostile items. “Buy it when you can,” she writes, however “even when you do not, go see it” at Longhi’s present.