Joan Jonas: the Wind sings

Gladstone presents Joan Jonas: the Wind sings, the artist’s first solo exhibition in South Korea. Composed of recent and historic works, the exhibition showcases Jonas' ongoing multidisciplinary approach to art-making, bridging boundaries between video, performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing for over five decades. Drawing inspiration from her diverse travels and the natural world, Jonas has produced an extensive oeuvre that explores the significance of humanity's relationship with the environment and its inhabitants. Spanning from one of her early video works, Wind (1968), to the installation of kites that recently debuted at the artist’s career retrospective, Good Night, Good Morning, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wind sings offers a dynamic reflection on the ubiquitous and ever-evolving presence of ritual, physicality, and natural vitality within Jonas’ work.

Throughout Jonas' career, nature has been a central theme, acting as a consistent force, setting, and muse for her work. Wind, one of Jonas' earliest filmed performances, captures the powerful interplay between humanity and the environment. The silent, black-and-white 16mm film, shot in stark, minimalist scenes, focuses on a group of performers battling the relentless wind on a barren Long Island beach. By outfitting two of the performers in mirrors –a signature element to the artist’s performances– Jonas creates a haunting effect where their bodies appear semi-transparent as if surrendering to the invisible forces that shape the other dancers’ struggles. A vanguard of performance art, Jonas imbues the film with her distinctive minimalist style, foregrounding the figures and their ritualistic movements to underscore her fascination with the elemental forces that govern the human experience.

The exhibition includes Jonas' most recent work, By a Thread in the Wind (2024), a collection of large Dó paper and bamboo kites that premiered in her survey at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hand-painted by Jonas, the vividly colored kites evoke the physicality of soaring birds or a gentle breeze, integrating imagery reminiscent of the natural world into her installations. By a Thread in the Wind transposes a living ecosystem into the gallery's interior, revealing an installation that offers viewers insight into the larger historical narrative understood through the permutations and transformations in the artist’s practice.

Across various media, Jonas deftly balances the visceral with the poetic, establishing an organic formal vocabulary that creates a dialogue between the past and the immediate. Evident in her broader body of work, she frequently revisits earlier ideas and reimagines them in new forms to further explore recurring themes. The artist’s recursive approach was prominently featured in Good Night, Good Morning, where the survey’s chronological structure was bookended by Wind and By a Thread in the Wind. the Wind sings brings together these two works in a synergic presentation, revealing the enduring visual and thematic fluidity in Jonas' dynamic creative practice.

출처: 글래드스톤