Blind Spots

SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to announce Blind Spots, an off-site exhibition in Seoul in collaboration with KALDI ART, featuring works by Trisha Baga, Petra Cortright, Salim Green, Conny Maier, Kaspar Müller, Jeanette Mundt, Edi Rama, Marianna Simnett, and Lu Yang, on view in Seoul during Frieze Seoul and Seoul Art Week.

A world of complete transparency entails the erosion of distance: the interval in which thought, trust, and encounters with difference can unfold. Bringing together works that explore translation, withholding, and concealment alongside practices attentive to material and temporal transformations, the group exhibition Blind Spots understands this lost interval as a generative space, one in which meanings, identities, and forms remain open and in process. The works assembled here don‘t explicitly comment on the acceleration of our contemporary communication society, but instead delve into spaces of delay and dislocation–some locating the blind spot in the metamorphosis of objects, images, and commodities, while others dwell in the self‘s own resistance to being fixed,known, or named.

Compelled by the voyage of the Webb telescope, Trisha Baga‘s celestial mindscapes explore how deep field views of the universe have become increasingly ubiquitous, shaping our collective perceptions of space. These images, they suggest, become surfaces for the imagination, mirrors of our hopes, dreams, and anxieties. From the boundless, immaterial “cloud” of the internet, Petra Cortright distills and reimagines luminous skyscapes, translating flows of images found online into tangible objects as an existential gesture: a resistance against the endless flux of the digital realm. The speculative framework “Dark Forest Theory” proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations remain hidden to avoid detection and destruction. Salim Green’s small-scale abstractions, with their resistant assertions of unknowability and interiority, build upon this idea. Operating as indeterminate terrains to be felt as much as seen, they gesture toward the slippages and dislocations that structure embodied experience. In

Kaspar Müller’s practice, familiar objects appear as hieroglyphs, recoded and stubbornly mute. His recent works, from constellations of vintage and “fake vintage“ bulbs to re-enactments of his daughter’s paintings on toilet paper, examine the residues of different systems of production and value. Jeanette Mundt departs from direct representation as a means of grappling with a world in which the very notion of “the real” is under siege, where images are endlessly manipulated, truths are contested, and perception itself is a battleground. In a monoprint-like process, she presses and displaces pigment across the surface of the canvas, imparting a contemporary sense of dislocation and pressure, and asking what potency paint can still hold in a world increasingly saturated with images.

Headless, Marianna Simnett’s new series of paintings, translates Max Ernst’s cut-and-paste technique into oil paint, subject and object dissolving into one another, generating unstable identities in which human, animal, male, and female forms converge and the notion of “headlessness” becomes a condition of transformation. Edi Rama’s works emerge from the margins of political life. His associative drawings, rendered on agenda printouts and memos, take the form of biomorphic blots and amorphous shapes, ink bleeding freely across the page in an improvisational reaction to a singular moment. These marks find a second life in bronze, carrying the residue of automatic mark-making into a material bound to permanence.

Lu Yang’s reincarnation videos continue his ongoing work DOKU, a digital shell, a virtual human named after the phrase Dokusho Dokushi—“we are born alone, and we die alone.” Yang describes Doku as a reincarnation of himself in a parallel universe, six versions of the avatar corresponding to Buddhism’s six paths of reincarnation: “He is me but someone else at the same time...a stream of consciousness which lingers in different worlds and different selves.” A similarly mutable notion of the self emerges in Conny Maier’s paintings of bathers, which evoke the subconscious and the dissolution of the self. Such existential themes are mirrored in the work’s placid aquatic setting, recalling what Gaston Bachelard calls “dormant water”: a liminal space existing “below the being and above the nothingness.”

Across these practices, the blind spot emerges as a site of potential rather than loss. If transparency, for the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, threatens to make everything visible, available, and legible–and thereby subject to a debilitating sameness–the works in the exhibition resist that promise in kind through aesthetic and conceptual strategies of translation, dissolution, and metamorphosis that unlock the blind spot‘s fugitive potential.