The exhibition will be installed in both the gallery space and Gallery Weekend Beijing 2021 Public Sector. Shifting the buildings into linguistic devices and experimental publications, the artist expands his explorations of the concepts and functions of buildings in a continuous manner.
Rather than rejecting its surrounding environment, Rafael Domenech’s work acknowledges it so as to activate the viewer physically and spiritually from the standpoint of treating all materials, including language and poems, deconstructable and destroyable. Embracing the notion of exhausting each item to the fullest extent, Domenech welcomes the artists invited and audience members to “intervene” in the exhibition space, aiming to “contaminate” the show and “destroy” the integrity of authorship, as a way to reproduce the materials used. This show functions as a social and cultural exercise as well as an experimental publication, encouraging the viewer to become aware of the process of entering and exiting a space and moreover, to experience the moments of encountering and communicating with others.
This installation is rooted in the artist’s broad interest in globalized socio-economic infrastructures, contemporary material productions, and their implications in the evolution of urban apparatus. Via the interplay between space, objects, and visitors, Domenech situates the viewer to negotiate their location within the room continuously. Through the act of touch, the artist interpolates the body as an active component within the exhibit, emulating and producing quotidian exchanges — that, for him, is a form of materiality. The show also initiates and embodies the shifting of materials, including the manufacturing of language and concrete poems. With the ideologies and practices introduced above, the show further negates the traditional hierarchy and boundaries set between the work and the viewer. Consequently, the show is in a constant state of happening and becoming. It echoes the artist’s full-of-truth emotions and long-standing contemplations on how to amplify perceptual experiences and how to allow possibilities to arise in the flow of such experiences, which ultimately, offer the viewer this platform for more dynamic interpretations.
