Curated by Margot Norton, Soft Water, Hard Stone (2022) consists of the works of 40 artists and collectives from around the world. The exhibition is a critique of the institution within conceptual art, pursuing social equality through a combination of boldly political and understated works. Responding to a Brazilian proverb: “soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole”, versions of which exist in cultures around the world, this exhibition explores notions of resilience, perseverance and resistance.
Gabriel Chaile’s ‘Mama Luchona’ (2021). PHOTO: DARIO LASAGNI/NEW MUSEUM
Curated by Margot Norton, Soft Water, Hard Stone (2022) consists of the works of 40 artists and collectives from around the world. The exhibition is a critique of the institution within conceptual art, pursuing social equality through a combination of boldly political and understated works. Responding to a Brazilian proverb: “soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole”, versions of which exist in cultures around the world, this exhibition explores notions of resilience, perseverance and resistance.
The proverb can be interpreted in two ways: desired outcomes can be achieved through persistence and perseverance, and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. This timely exhibition responds to political, and socio-economic destabilisation during the Covid era. Curator, Margot Norton is known for
favouring unconventional works by emerging artists. The gallery is filled with sculptures made from the unusual materials of tents, carpets and concrete, and photographs that deny their audience a central focal point. The works are positioned unconventionally within the space, suggesting that one does not know where things stand. Seeking to subvert their audience’s expectations of traditional Western art forms, the works act as a metaphor for political, social and cultural transformations which the artists have witnessed in their recent lives.
Soft Water, Hard Stone seeks to empower individuals and marginalised groups through the message it delivers: water, although fluid and transient, is capable of eventually dissolving stone. The message resonates with Covid-era economic upheavals, the national traumas experienced by countries around the world, and environmental activism surrounding climate change.
Gabriela Mureb, Machine #4: stone (ground), 2017. Engine, stone, and aluminum, 35 x 75 x 25 cm. Photo by Dario Lasagni.
Gabriela Mureb’s kinetic sculpture Machine #4: Stone (Ground) (2017) is a head-on response to the exhibition’s theme. Positioned directly on the gallery floor, at shin-height of the audience, Mureb’s work consists of an upright quartz stone and a motorised metal rod that rhythmically rams the stone’s surface. Each time the pole hits the stone, it rocks slightly backward, and then resumes its balance before being hit again. The repeated rocking sound resonates through the concrete floor as the sculpture becomes something like a relentless, mechanical heartbeat within the gallery space. Although it is one of the smallest works in the exhibition, Mureb’s art- engine is an upfront and potent symbol of resistance, strength, and reciprocity. In both the ecological sense, and as a discussion of human labour, the interaction between the two moving parts is emblematic of the relationship between machine and environment.
Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, waves move bile, 2020. Photo : Alex Greenberger for ARTnews
Waves move bile (2020) is an installation of suspended sculptures by artist-duo Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho. The work contains five hanging lanterns composed of organic matter, light and sound. Each of the lanterns wears the face of an emblematic female form appropriated from French sculptor Louis Botinelly’s allegorical monument Colonies d’Asie. Lien and Camacho subvert the submissive nature of Botinelly’s reclining nude; in the darkened gallery space she appears upright and assertive, in the form of ghostly multiples.
Lien and Camacho's use of modest organic materials such as rice paper allude to a living body, whilst synthetic sounds and lights add spirituality to the work. Audio recordings of internal pulses, medical procedures and ambient noise can be heard through the gallery, presenting the figures as ‘living’ sculptures. The lanterns’ exposed organs hang beneath their decapitated heads, as each face meets the audience’s gaze with gaping eyes of fire. The burning eyes of Lien and Camacho’s figures reference the mythical spirit Ahp in reclamation of Indochinese folklore and culture. The work actively liberates a once passive character from her history of racism and colonial violence.
Suspended in the darkened gallery space, Lien and Camacho's glowing spirits speak of rupture and survival. Responding to Norton’s theme, their installation has an underlying generative energy. The power of Soft Water is its ability to reclaim the monstrous past through a celebration of culture.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Nothing Further Beyond, 2021. Photo by Alex Greenberger for ARTnews
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s Nothing Further Beyond (2011) is a dynamic installation of carpet offcuts, arranged to look like layers of earth on a large central floor plinth. Cleanly cut and arranged, some stacks of carpet bend slightly over cylindrical poles, alluding to tectonic movement, and the accompanying disruption of buried histories, within the earth’s layers. Büyüktaşçıyan’s sculptural installation references the ruins of the Arch of Theodosius in her home city of Istanbul. These ruins have been metaphorically marked as the border of Western civilisation, bearing the Latin phrase “Nothing Further Beyond” which Büyüktaşçıyan uses to title her work. The displaced stacks of carpet suggest a fictional dimension to political borders and the inevitability of shifting territories. The work frames history, memory and identity as objective and evolving. Büyüktaşcıyan’s soft carpet sculptures embrace a material poetics, exploring the tension between fluidity and petrification, destruction and emergence.
Krista Clark’s “Annotations on Shelter 3,” from 2021. Charlie Rubin for The New York Times
Krista Clark’s Annotations on Shelter #3 (2021) is a sculpture constructed from a concrete slab and the found objects of a pop-up tent and power cable. The tent is positioned vertically and is pinned to the wall by the weight of the leaning concrete. Created during the Covid-era, Clark’s work speaks both of indoors isolation and homeless displacement caused by rising house prices and economic upheaval in the global developed world. Known for her established body of work in drawing and painting, Clark has labelled her recent sculptural practice as “improvisational”1. She plays with unconventional forms and materials which are balanced in a precarious manner. In working with a lightweight readymade tent and heavy industrial concrete, Clark disrupts material hierarchies within the Western art world. She collapses such distinctions as temporary and permanent, moveable and fixed, as well as, in spirit with the exhibition’s theme, soft and hard.
Soft Water, Hard Stone is an exhibition about resistance during trying times. Whilst its many works examine issues of politics, culture, race, gender and history, their messages are embedded within the materials of each work, exposed only through conscious and conceptual interaction. The exhibition is a discussion of our relationship to the natural world, and the strength of environmental regeneration. It reconsiders the permanence of violence, colonial power and displacement. The triennial’s artists and collectives review Western histories, artistic traditions and institutions, coming to a similar conclusion: there is strength in resistance that can dismantle even the most perceptibly solid of structures.