Jonathan Uliel Saldanha: Chance Room
Duarte Sequeira is pleased to present Chance Room, the first exhibition in Seoul by Jonathan Uliel Saldanha.
There is a particular melancholy that belongs to objects which have stopped doing what they were built for: present in outline, their old purpose quietly missing. Saldanha has spent most of the last two decades working with an equivalent condition in sound, performance, video and the collectives he has founded and directed, treating voice and rhythm as things that carry a residue long after the moment that produced them has passed. Chance Room moves that same problem into the register of the object. What is missing here is never named directly. Its absence is what the pieces are made of.
A helmet, left to oxidise, drifts into resembling a skull, corrosion working on it slowly, the property that once made it recognisable as protection withdrawing without incident. Groups of figures disappear under black resin, and what is lost is not the body but its separateness, several individuated forms fusing into one continuous, faintly reflective surface. In the shallow reliefs, volume itself, the space a body or a device once occupied, is evacuated, replaced by an image that offers only the memory of dimensionality. Mouth Head takes this evacuation furthest: a face reduced to a single opening, once used for speech, breath, sound, now only for looking inward.
None of this settles into an argument about failure. Failure would require a function that was simply lost. What haunts these works instead is closer to persistence without purpose, the sense that an object can outlive its own use and carry on regardless, disoriented but intact, still occupying the space a body or a shield once occupied. This condition has a long prior history, in reliquaries, in exoskeletons, in the casings industrial labour leaves behind once whatever they protected has gone, and Saldanha's sculptures inherit that history as a kind of low, ambient grief rather than a citation. The tone throughout is closer to mourning than to critique, though the two are difficult to fully separate here.
