The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA) presents Under Construction, a solo exhibition by Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980, Seoul) featuring a newly commissioned installation of sculpture and video, and series of live performances. Working from her background in choreography and a studied interest in the role of objects and technology in our lives, Jeong uses her body and animatronic figures built from DIY parts to parse the uncanny relationships between people and machines. In her past work, Jeong has animated self-constructed remote-controlled robots using mechanical and tech hardware tools and spare mannequin parts and medical dummies. With this new exhibition in the ICA’s lower galleries, Jeong expands her ongoing project, Under Construction, incorporating complete human skeleton models as a central component of the work.
Left in various gestures and states of completion, Jeong’s mechanical bodies occupy the centre of the gallery floor. Their bones resemble the order of those in a human skeleton, yet they are everywhere appended, flayed and sutured by machine parts. Under Construction will explore the link between humans and machines through sculptures, in-process constructions, in person performances and video installation that both document actions between Jeong and the skeleton-machines, and the artist’s tender creation and maintenance of the work. As in the performances, the sculptures in the videos – more co-performers than objects – act in a clumsy, unreliable manner. Jeong explores with equal attention the bodies’ successes and failures: their halting, faltering actions as studied as those they manage with graceful fluidity. Their movements solicit a range of affinities in the viewer, from appeal to horror. In the gallery when they are still, as they primarily are, they exude an uncanny frission of life.
Jeong’s installation offers a proposal for the active life of sculpture in a public institution. The artist will perform in-person with her figural machines multiple times during the run of the exhibition, reimagining and shifting the installation. Jeong’s work shares a valuable history with performative and interactive sculpture since the 1960s, while being firmly rooted in the present and a specific context of technology in late-stage capitalism, which the artist approaches from the perspective afforded by an adolescence spent in Seoul during the steep rise in consumerism in South Korea. This tender yet uncomfortable work represents a nuanced investigation of global techno-capitalism, addressing human relationships with our technological counterparts through care and mutual exchange. Jeong addresses this fundamental component of our appended human society in a way only sculpture can – by addressing the physical relationships in space that underline our connection to objects as active agents.