Cultural Development Consulting

::

DREAM HOME

This year, CDC will present the work of four artists and one artistic partnership at China’s largest and longest-running photo festival, the Pingyao International Photograph Festival. Each explores the psychological dislocations between the consumerist ‘dream’, domestic convention and the complex, sometimes dissonant, interior life of the individual. Hailing from four continents, they bring a range of perspectives shaped by personal experience, community culture and an equivocal response to the commoditisation and conventions of that most intimate place of sanctuary: home.

~

~

~
Viktoria Sorochinski

Daddy

~

The award-winning Ukrainian photographer, Viktoria Sorochinski, explores the relationship between Andrew and his daughter Lucy. Andrew is an insecure and conflicted young man who feels as though he is still a child who needs love and protection. At the same time he is now a parent and must be strong in order that he himself can take care of a child. Over a number of years, the artist has worked with father and daughter to help them act out his fears and explore the multiple layers of their relationship in a way that is both playful and profound.

~

~

~
Magdalena Bors

The Seventh Day

The Australian artist Magdalena Bors conjures the entanglement of creation and compulsion. In each, an iconic landscape has been recreated in an unlikely form and location. Jigsaw puzzles coalesce into a vivid coral reef; stacks of old newspapers are sculpted into the likeness of an Australian geological tourist attraction known as The Twelve Apostles; laundry becomes a jungle. Yet for all their industry, the makers regard the results of their labour with a look of perplexity. Are these driven figures haunted, possessed or simply struggling for a meaning that, as yet, remains beyond their grasp?

~

~

~
Suk Kuhn Oh

The Textbook (Chulsoo and Younghee)

Suk Kuhn Oh explores the psychological tension between idealised notions of childhood and the darker domestic realities. Korean textbooks for children are filled with didactic images in which every-boy and every-girl figures such as Chulsoo and Younghee play out stereotypical stories with an uplifting moral. However, the day-to-day lives of children growing up in Korea in the seventies, eighties and nineties were more complex and troubling. Suk Kuhn Oh’s work portrays the sad reality that for many adults their memories of childhood are of humiliation, guilt, trauma, shock and stress.

~

~

~
Sian Bonnell

Everyday Dada

The British artist Sian Bonnell employs an absurdist strategy to raise critical questions: about the role of advertising in defining the nature of the domestic, turning it from a nurturing nest into a showroom of aspirational affluence; about the assumptions made as to the role of women in the home; even about the madness of war initiated for commercial ends. Here, like a sugar coating, humour encases a less palatable and troubling realities.

~

~

~
Hillerbrand+Magsamen

Higher Ground

In ‘Higher Ground’, a family ransack their suburban home for materials with which to build space ship. Their quixotic endeavour reflects both the historic work ethic of the early settlers and the contemporary mirage of the ‘American Dream’. The family’s eventual triumph is not of this world, but in the alternate reality of the cinematic escapism. Based in Houston, Texas, Hillerbrand+Magsamen develop projects that speak about family dynamics, suburban life and the excesses of American consumerism in a practice they call “suburban fluxus”.

~

Curated by Alasdair Foster, Dream Home will open in Pingyao on 19 September 2015 and run for the duration of the festival.

~

Images (from the top):

© Sian Bonnell ‘Serving Suggestion #09’

© Viktoria Sorochinski – from the series ‘Daddy’

© Magdalena Bors ‘Jungle’ from the series ‘The Seventh Day’

© Suk Kuhn Oh – from the series ‘The Text Book (Chulsoo and Younghee)’

© Sian Bonnell ‘House Beautiful #15’

© Hillerbrand+Magsamen ‘Cockpit’

~