스킵네비게이션

Bianca BONDI, The Antechamber, 2020, Mixed media, variable dimensions

BONDI’s new installation for Busan Biennal 2020, The Antechamber, is a translation of KIM Hyesoon’s poem, Tundra Swan. As Bondi states: “salt is essential for life but too much brings death.” Taking inspiration from paintings such as Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) or John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-1852), we observe a clinical but feminine bedroom setting composed of a bed with a pond in it, echoing a circular mirror above a dresser at the end of a pathway through the tundra. All is covered with salt except the pond and the mirror. We are then invited to cross over an open-air cosmic digestive space where salt represents preservation but also resurrection. A swan stands alone. It symbolizes the force of art and poetry, capable of singing even better before its death. We are living in a system that leads us to death and we are all survivors in resistance like the phoenix rising from our ashes. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed. The salt can dissolve in water and later recrystallize and oxidize around itself.