Petrine is pleased to present encore!, an exhibition of new work by Aerin Hong, comprising three photographs and a film. An encore is the moment of being called back to the stage after a performance has ended. In repetition, meaning dissolves, and something different emerges.
Hong’s photographs depict dog leashes of three, five, and eight-metres length, suspended and coiled in mid-air, staged in a structure that could resemble a cage, or a puppet theatre. Puppets move because they are moved – agency is constructed and performed. Leashes being objects that constrain movement, they are themselves entangled, and carry their own behavioural history. In South Korea, the term ‘one-metre dog’ originates from a violent and neglectful mode of keeping dogs, symbolised by the short leash, that has recently become the subject of an animal rights campaign. In Germany, Hobby Dogging is a new trend in which people train imaginary dogs using real leashes and harnesses, navigating obstacle courses, complete with cones and commands. The attention of the exercise is redirected toward the handler. What the activity makes visible is less about the absent animal than about the person holding the leash and their relationship to an invisible other, about their habits of authority, control, and self-correction.
In Percussionists, Hong continues to deconstruct and recompose action and context, examining the ways in which people calibrate themselves. Stina Fors plays a character filming an audition-tape for the role of a percussionist. Operating the camera herself, Stina’s character enters her home, changes clothes, and walks into a living room as if it were a stage. A mysterious figure played by Elisabeth Flunger is waiting for her. Using objects and furniture around her, Stina begins a percussion performance. Soon after, Elisabeth joins in, and the performance reaches its climax, ending as their eyes meet. Here, control is relinquished and reassigned: what the film captures is determined as much by the performers as by the director.
Helmuth Plessner described what he called eccentric positionality, the uniquely human capacity to step outside oneself and observe one’s own behaviour from an external vantage point. Hong’s works do exactly that: they stage the self at a remove from its own action. The controlling subject steps to one side to watch what happens in their absence. Hong is drawn to the contexts that make this possible, the stage, the gaze, the audition – situations in which individual behaviour is separa
