Raise

To kick off the year, Luis Adelantado presents Raise, the first exhibition in Spain by Young-jun Tak.

In 1966, Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist known for her analysis of symbolism and biblical texts, published Purity and danger, a book in which she examined the concepts of cleanliness and dirt, and their imbrication with our bodies and even their relationship with environmental risk.

In her work, Douglas dissected the symbols concealed in everyday life, guided by a distinctive sensibility that enabled her to grasp the problems underlying ritual manifestations charged with concepts of pollution and taboo. Rites that bring to light another notion of purity, as part of a greater whole that introduces us to new issues affecting social life in general. Reflecting on dirt brings with it a rethinking of order and disorder, being and non-being, form, life and, naturally, death.

The anthropologist draws us into a world where purity and impurity forge a unity of experience and reveals to us that the universe is divided into certain things and actions that are subject to restrictions, while others are not. As she put it, “sometimes bodily orifices seem to represent points of entry or exit to social units, or bodily perfection can symbolize an ideal theocracy.” Giving impurity a double meaning that infers contact with divinity (whatever that may be to the individual).

These reflections lead us in a roundabout way to the projects and investigations of Young-jun Tak, inasmuch as his curiosity about and engagement with the body, rituals and magic, as well as the purity, flesh, eroticism, and pollution that, in one way or another, cut across every one of our everyday acts.

In Raise, Young-jun Tak continues his ongoing line of investigation grounded in the sociocultural and psychological mechanisms that give shape to belief systems, covering everything from simple cult objects to other more sophisticated forms of religion. The exhibition includes a range of works employing video, photography, and sculpture in which the human body is exposed within a context of norms going beyond the confines of polarized conventions. Works in which the everyday is suffused with ritual, leaving us with a certain sense of uncertainty. And this doubt that hovers over the atmosphere and our connection with the works enables us to take a certain distance and allows another kind of interpretation to emerge, freer and without any pretensions to explain.

Young-jun Tak embraces contrasts, the contradictions proper to a contemporary society which is no more than a mirror held up to our past, in order to try to dissolve codified aesthetics, to recalibrate our brain to address new realities that coexist on different levels in today’s world.