Installation
fiber optic cable sheaths, concrete, neon, copper, cable, 5000 volt, waveform generator, signal sweep, cable, speaker, steel
The work of the Swedish artist Nina Canell considers sculpture as a form of conduction: a medium of storage, transmission, and reception. Employing material such as water, air, chewing gum or electricity, her communities of objects quietly interact with one another, allowing the sculptural process to register changeability, uncertainty, and exchange.
For her first institutional exhibition in Asia, Canell researched the production and distribution of subterranean fiber optic cables among the outskirts of Seoul. Her findings constitute the floor-based tangles of Shedding Sheaths. Here, mounds of cables are gutted and their ‘skins’ (sheaths) compressed into dense lumps of unimaginable distances. They share a room with two other elements: a discolored neon tube with a fatigued current passing through it and a waveform that journeys through the upper part of the audible frequency range, seemingly dissolving into the air. Conceived as one installation, the work moves between what is there and what is not: immaterial impulses and infrastructural leftovers of our collectively extended nervous system.