Master Project
Tenzing Barshee
“SCULPTURES”, solo exhibition
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Tenzing Barshee
14 February–19 April 2015
Triangle France/Le Cartel, Marseille, France
Margaret Honda
Sculptures contained three works of art. Three objects that are three propositions for Sculptures as sculpture. At first, it seems like a rather empty exhibition, what is on display is an ensemble of white walls, forming empty rooms, and at their center a looped projection of a supposedly empty 16mm film, which visually only offers a white rectangle of light or the lack of an image, and the physical presence of the projector itself.
But the space and spaces that Margaret Honda created in Sculptures aren’t merely empty; on the contrary they are full of thought, actively modified to express their own physical materiality and by this they create a sentiment, yet unsentimental at its core, but a true emotional stake not only by introducing a human element as part of the void but by emphasizing on an activity that is purely human: our ongoing cultural production ( the Larger Narrative ). Her idea, was not to ship any physical work and only build drywalls.
She proposed to build one room-sized, labyrinthine sculpture, titled Sculpture, which would allow the audience to explore all of her production sites she ever used in her life. This sculpture would represent all of her fifteen previously used studios, to scale, arranged in a circular fashion.
This concrete proposal served as an opportunity to raise questions about the general material manifestation of an artwork (the sculpture), basically how work occupies and how it vacates space, whilst embedding its conceptual framework into reflections about the physical conditions (the studio) in which artworks are conceived and produced. It was decided that this proposal would exclude the presentation of other works of the artist, since any other artwork positioned in front of Sculpture would have rendered the sculpture itself into a backdrop.
The only exception was the negative space, which would be formed at the center of this circular arrangement of rooms and that would act as the only non-representative room created as part of Sculpture. Inside this collateral space, as the the second work of the exhibition, the artist would premier one of her latest projects, a 16mm film titled Wildflowers. Challenging the audience’s imaginative abilities, Sculptures would emancipate itself from the Literality of Representation, as stated in the press release, suggesting a void not as an empty place but rather as a site of powerful production.