Germaine Koh and Aron Louis Cohen: Afterlives
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Or Gallery 236 East Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1T7
Aron Louis Cohen, "Unmaking Time, Forward and Reverse," 2012 / 2017
duraclear prints, wire binding stainless steel, LED light. 5” x 24” x 12” Courtesy of the artist.
Afterlives Extensions: ( currency )Germaine Koh and Aron Louis Cohen, with Russell Gordon Curated by Joni Low
Cathedral Square Park January 25 – 27; & January 30 – 31: 12 to 4 pm
Onsite Smelting: Saturday January 27, 2 to 5 pm
Free to the public As part of the exhibition Afterlives, Aron Louis Cohen and Germaine Koh will perform ( currency ) at Cathedral Square Park, transforming Koh’s new mobile structure, Home Made Home: Boothy, into a currency exchange.1 The public is invited to bring small, unwanted electronic items – such as computers and peripherals, cell phones, TVs or home appliances – in exchange for ( currency ) extracted from its parts.
Koh and Cohen will create ad-hoc coins from electronic waste – stamped, registered and available in exchange for more e-waste. They will dismantle objects in the booth, exposing the labour often outsourced to city perimeters and developing countries. On Saturday, January 27, in collaboration with Russell Gordon and his portable foundry, the artists will pour( currency ) onsite.
( currency ) considers the range of values represented in technological objects designed for obsolescence. How do currencies and these electronic devices act as support structures for social and material relations? What are the disparities between use-value and exchange-value, and how might they be bridged? By examining the relationship between materials, the symbolism assigned to them, and their circulation – through purchase, recycling, or disposal – the project questions the logic of “value.” Ironically, while wealth becomes consolidated among the few, “waste” has become abundant, even excessive.
Value today is often linked to a material’s scarcity and necessity – associated with its level of manufacture, its functionality in combination with other materials as consumer goods, and social consensus. Manufacturing produces objects essential to our functioning within technologized society. Computers, phones, laptops and tablets include a number of refined metals, such as gold, silver, copper, aluminum, niobium and rare-earth metals. These elements can be re-extracted from e-waste after its social and functional value approaches nil.
The de-linking of currency from a material standard almost fifty years ago, and the continued abstraction of capital, is part of a wider neoliberal deregulation of the economy, welfare state and public life. In an era of precarity, speculative cryptocurrencies, mass inflation, and rising debt, it becomes apparent that material “waste” is also a wealth – of debt, certainly to our earth. How might we invert “value,” and conceive of “waste” and its potentials differently – so as to imagine different possible futures?
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Things fall apart and are forgotten; sometimes they re-form in unexpected ways.
Technologies old and new signify a human desire to understand, interface with and possess the world. Material intermediaries, often supports to human activity, tend to be hidden, made supplementary, or discarded after their intended use. Communication technologies transmit messages, providing conduits and thresholds between interiors and exteriors: between selves, things and worlds. Today, such technologies oscillate between material and deceivingly immaterial. Digital repositories of collective experience and memory – second worlds, second lives – have become mediated aleatory streams for accelerated knowing.
Afterlives contemplates these technologies and their communicative properties, contemporary disconnection from material realities, and the care for materials once conceived as waste. Germaine Koh and Aron Louis Cohen examine and re-form material detritus and the traces of global economies to convey plasticity and potential. Electronic waste, takeaway plastics, tourist merchandise, and the enclosures and supports of industrialized logistics all undergo transformation. Speculating on origins and circulations of these materials amidst a culture of planned obsolescence, they seek to better understand the intersections of energies – time, labour, emotion, power – embedded within our late-capitalist experience. Afterlives considers the hidden processes that manufacturing and its related waste often obscure, prompting questions of value, use, and trust in encountering the world.
The mysterious back-end of production reveals political and geographic imbalances in human systems of creation and disposal. Paradoxically, our present access to this information often requires the very processes that are harming others and the world. If external forms suggest what is unseen, and if signal and thing are bound by shared material processes; if plasticity is the capacity to give and receive form – between things, each other, the world – then how might we commune with the material and human world to learn and understand differently?
… How too, might we become something else?