Candice Lin works in the media of drawing, porcelain, and installations in which fluids circulate and seep through materials, at times transcending the finite art object and spreading onto the gallery floor. At AB6, a selection of drawings direct our attention to time as perceived through and created by colonial history, global trade, and Western desires. The works address things morphing over time, technological apparatuses to measure and quantify not only time but also bodies and nature, as well as the continuous problems of representation politics. The drawing Still Life: Collections of Time, for instance, references the 1953 French essay film directed by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet titled Statues Also Die. Since it deals with the effects colonialism has had on the perception of historical African arts, the film was banned in France until the 1960s. Negotiating the boundaries of race, sexuality, and geography, Lin’s works mimic and transcend the style of drawings made to document colonial expeditions, questioning the founding narratives of anthropology and calling attention to Western exoticism and anxieties bound up in ethnography through today.

#westerndesire #anthropology #colonialism #chrismarker #representation #time

photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI