A sculpture for skate and movement – Koo Jeong A exhibits at Malmö Konsthall

EHM [Event Horizon Malmö], this summer's exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, consists of OooOoO Malmö (2024): a skateable sculpture constructed entirely of wood. The Korean artist Koo Jeong A, who represents South Korea at this year's Venice Biennale, has worked with Malmö Konsthall's distinctive exhibition space and created a star-shaped sculpture wedged between the building's supporting columns. Malmö Konsthall has built the exhibition upon the vision of architect Klas Anshelm to use the space as a playing field for artistic experimentation. It is also an invitation to the unique skate community of Malmö that gathers on the square outside the Konsthall during the summer months. The exhibition opens on the 1st of June and runs until 25^th of August.

– ­The door to the art gallery represents a boundary that we as an institution have a duty to challenge. The square outside Malmö Konsthall represents a meeting place for Malmö’s skaters, the energy created there is both informal and improvised. For a long time I have been thinking about how we can capture that energy and allow it to disperse into the exhibition space, says Mats Stjernstedt, Director of Malmö Konsthall.

The result is the exhibition EHM [Event Horizon Malmö], which opens on the 1^st of June. Site and space function as points of departure in Koo Jeong A’s practice. The immersive work OooOoO Malmö is a unique and playful transformation of Malmö Konsthall’s exhibition room. Koo Jeong A works with ideas of immaterialism, endlessness and levitation, which in the instance of the exhibition EHM [Event Horizon Malmö] translates to a skateable sculpture. They often work within public space and have previously created similar sculptures that interact with skate communities in places including Vassiviere (France), Milan (Italy) and Uiwang-si (South Korea). This year, related works will also be carried out at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and in The Tuileries Gardens in Paris.

– The role of the audience is crucial to my practice. In OooOoO Malmö they can skate, walk and move through the sculpture, but it is also about how such a work permeates beyond direct experience, says Koo Jeong A.

– I am interested in how art can impact and enhance our lived experience of the world, leading us towards a more ecstatic vision of reality.

A stream of continuous transformation

At Malmö Konsthall the sculpture will be complemented by a selection of enlarged drawings executed directly on the walls. In this way, the works in the exhibition represent four dimensions – from one-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional sculpture, to what the artist describes as the fourth dimension beyond the spatial: time, movement and gravity. The artist works with subtle changes in spatial and material qualities, with the ability to modify architectural spaces through various art forms including sculpture, painting, film, animation, sound and smell. The works give the impression of being in a stream of continuous transformation and explore how the senses are shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

The exhibition title EHM [Event Horizon Malmö] refers to the surface layer of black holes and the border between black holes and the rest of the universe. The six circles in the work title OooOoO Malmö symbolise the six circular formations in the sculpture.

Koo Jeong A is this year’s artist exhibiting in the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the work Odorama Cities, an installation about memories and scents. The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall is organised in close collaboration with the Korean Pavilion and is curated by Mats Stjernstedt, Seolhui Lee and Jacob Fabricius.

– Koo has managed to strip down the Korean pavilion to its minimum and with simple means created a very poetic, contemplative, and meditative experience for the audience. The seventeen scents installed in the pavilion unite Korean scent memories both locally and globally, says Lee and Fabricius.

An experiment with exhibition form

In recent years Malmö Konsthall has explored a variety of exhibition forms, through for example the climate opera Sun & Sea and the anti-racist choral work Glömskans arkiv (The Archive of Forgetting). This summer’s exhibition is a continuation of this experimental approach and the vision of using the exhibition space as a playground to show the breadth of what art can be. Every day during the exhibition period the public will be invited to interact with the work, skating or walking through the installation.

Bryggeriet, with extensive experience in building skate parks around Sweden, has been hired to build the work OooOoO Malmö. Bryggeriet's gymnasium, with its unique educational profile specialising in skateboarding, art, photography and film, is involved in the exhibition programme. During the opening night of the exhibition on the 31st of May, an exhibition of students’ work will also open in the Workshop of Malmö Konsthall and the skateboarding students will inaugurate the sculpture OooOoO Malmö during the vernissage.

– Art, street culture and design are central to our students' education and lives, and collaborations with external organisations gives this a sense of context. In collaboration with Malmö Konsthall, the students have created a local connection to Koo's work. Their three-part exhibition, entitled Transformaktion, portrays, among other things, learning as a form of change and the intersection between art and skateboarding, says John Dahlquist, Deputy Principal at Bryggeriets gymnasium.

Skate Malmö is also involved as partners and co-hosts at the exhibition opening on the 31^st of May. The vernissage coincides with the opening of Skate Malmö's LOVE Malmö project in the same neighbourhood – a reconstruction of the iconic LOVE Park skatepark in Philadelphia. The event gathers skateboarders from all over the world with various activities scheduled throughout the weekend.

Koo Jeong A’s work OooOoO Malmö is supported by the Hjalmar Wicander Fund at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Lorens and Agnes Beijer Foundation for Urban Beautification, the Church of Sweden and the City of Malmö. The sculpture will be placed in Malmö's public space after this summer's exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, in collaboration with The Society for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Green Parks in Malmö and the City of Malmö’s ongoing architectural project Malmö in the Making.

Press images can be downloaded here with the password ”press2024”: https://malmokonsthall.se/en/press-page