kurimanzutto celebrates the solo exhibition of artist Haegue Yang at the Kesselhaus (Boiler House) in KINDL (Center of Contemporary Art).

Once a year, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art invites an artist to present a single work in the imposing, twenty-metre-high Boiler House. This year the artist Haegue Yang, who lives in Berlin and Seoul, is realising her first institutional presentation in Berlin with a large-scale work.

As a sculptor, Yang is known for her use of a variety of materials and diverse working methods. Her materials range from industrial mass-produced items to organic and immaterial things such as smells or noises.

Her working method is labour-intensive both conceptually and in regard to the craftsmanship involved. At the KINDL she will use her most well-known material: window blinds, which have become a signature of her work.

Memories of the aggressive industrial development in South Korea in the 1970s and ’80s continue to shape her oeuvre today, as is also apparent in her work Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense, which she showed at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012.

While for many Western countries the Industrial Revolution was a defining but long since past experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now in other parts of the world it is occurring alongside rapid technological development. The collectively experienced change in all areas of life which these fundamental shifts entail serves as one of the points of departure for Haegue Yang’s work. 

That is why the artist understands the Boiler House at the KINDL as a typically post-industrial place that is now only a relic of its original industrial era and has been repurposed as a cultural venue. This is not the first time that Yang has exhibit in spaces typical of modern-day cities, such as a former freight train station in Kassel and the Tanks at Tate Modern in London.