ANNE DUK HEE JORDAN

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

The End Is Where We Start From

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

These lines by T. S. Eliot from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, written in London in 1942, provide Anne Duk Hee Jordan with the title of her first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The end is where we start from articulates a circular motion that she evokes in the exhibition space both thematically and physically. According to the artist, who was born in Korea in 1978 and raised in Germany, “to fully understand ecology we need to think in circles without interruption.”

The exhibition, which she developed specifically for KunstHausWien, consists of two worlds, each of which takes up one floor of the building: the Archean Eon, the period of time when life first emerged and an atmosphere of breathing, as well as a magically fluorescent underwater world that allows visitors to dive into the depths of the ocean, which is populated by fantastic creatures and microscopic phytoplankton.

There, visitors encounter fluid worlds, rich in oxygen, inhabited by living organisms and lifeless materials. Mirrored walls create a visually unstable, perpetually reflecting setting for films, sculptures, and sounds. Kinetic sculptures—or “robotic critters”—sing, dance, and make distracting noises. Everything is interwoven with one another; no element is stable or isolated. Visitors engage in a dialogue with natural phenomena, technology, and art.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s ecological-utopian exhibition welcomes us into an artistic universe inspired by marine life, geology, sexuality, reproduction, and symbiosis. Employing the beginnings of time and space, she asks: Who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going?

The exhibition The end is where we start from is a meditation on a life-long, never-ending journey. Travelers already undergo a transformation upon their arrival—or to invoke the words of Eliot and the motto of Mary Stuart: In my beginning is my end.

About the Artist
Anne Duk Hee Jordan was born in Korea in 1978 and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and subsequently completed a Masters in Fine Arts with Ólafur Elíasson at the Institute for Spatial Experiments in Berlin. Anne Duk Hee Jordan is Professor of Digital Media Art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.

Solo and group exhibitions (selection) Canal Projects, New York (2024, in preparation); I will always weather with you, The Bass, Miami Beach, Florida (2023/2024); Liquid Intelligence, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2023); Re/Sisters. A Lens on Gender and Ecology, Barbican Art Gallery, London (2023); Worlds Away, Alexander Levy, Berlin (2023); 1.5 Degrees, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2023); Soft and Weak Like Water, 14. Gwangju Biennale (2023); I must transform myself into a life-form that can exist on this planet, HEK - House of Electronic Arts, Basel (2023); Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe, with Pauline Doutreluingne, Baltic Art Centre and Public Art Agency Sweden, Gotland (2022); Making Kin 3. 0, KIOSK, Ghent (2021); Down to Earth, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Forces Times Distance - On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies, Sonsbeek (2020); Ziggy goes wild, Kunstverein Arnsberg (2019); International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Riga (2018).


Curator
Barbara Horvath