Installation view of 《Sacrificium》. Photo: Euirock Lee. © CR Collective
CR Collective presents a solo exhibition 《Sacrificium》 by artist Dew Kim, on view
through June 27.
Dew Kim has long explored the ways bodies intersect and are
performed within religious systems, sexuality, and sadomasochistic practices.
This exhibition, 《Sacrificium》, overlays the sites of ritual
and desire, proposing an ethics of another dimension.
Beginning from the 2018 solo exhibition 《Succulent Humans》,
which queerly appropriated the story of Adam and the rib in Genesis to unsettle
gender binaries and hierarchies and to explore hybrid bodies, this exhibition
radically expands that mythic narrative.
Here, the origin of the world is not an individual entity but a
succulent body formed through grafting and proliferation, and the form of these
bodies piercing and entwining one another arrives as an aesthetic and ethical
community.
Installation view of 《Sacrificium》. Photo: Euirock Lee. © CR Collective
In particular, within this space where the ritual site and the
dungeon where BDSM play takes place strangely overlap, a rewritten Genesis and
newly composed sacred images and hymns constitute a queer ethical system. The
first condition of this ethics lies in abandoning the belief in innocent and
refined moral norms, in normative and safe relationships.
Instead, it appears in the form of filling one another’s holes,
proliferating as bundles, and entwining one another in pleasure and pain,
dependence and trust. And this readily exceeds the singular origin, the normal
body, and heterosexual norms presupposed by religious systems, presenting
itself as a structural condition that constitutes this transgressive world.
Therefore, 《Sacrificium》 is both a
sanctuary where stigmatized desires gather and the figure of an ethical
community woven through the most radical care and mutual dependence. Here, from
bodies that have undergone passion and from torn wounds, flesh and desire
proliferate.
Here, a
single body opens, connects, and is endlessly reborn. As those sacred scenes,
receive with joy the grace therein revealed. A very old ethics, an unending
gospel, shall come.
