haubrok foundation | haegue yang: unpacking storage piece

For the first time, Haegue Yang unpacks the work Storage Piece, in which she had stacked and packed artworks on four euro pallets. The objects derive from various installations, such as five Korean fans from adopting proportion (De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, 2003), metal shelves on a wooden ramp (…, where everything was painstakingly ordered at its place, Manifesta 4, Frankfurt/Main, 2002), a stack of Korean plastic bottle crates (Tilting on a plane, Korean art and Culture Foundation, Seoul, 2002), as well as paper collages, photographs, and much more.
Storage Piece was created in 2003. It consists of works that had yet to be sold and nowhere to be stored. Meanwhile, the work, born from necessity, had been exhibited numerous times. Upon its purchase by Axel Haubrok at Art Forum 2005 in Berlin, Haegue Yang transferred the work’s authorship to the collector. The possibility to unpack it was a conceptual part of the work and has now been realized by the owner together with the artist.
Haegue Yang lives and works in Berlin and in Seoul, where she was born in 1971. Her artistic work focuses on the tension between processes of everyday perception and communication. Storage Piece deals with the common treatment of art in studios, galleries, and collections. It is about storage, about the salability of art, about the possession of art, and the respective implications. in an extension of the conceptual possibilities of the piece, Unpacking Storage Piece can be understood as a statement by Haegue Yang as well as by Axel Haubrok; its presentation at Strausberger Platz is likewise merely an aggregate state of Storage Piece.
Storage Piece had last been presented in the exhibition Made in Germany at Kestnergesellschaft Hannover, and in 2006 at the São Paulo Biennial.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a German and English language documentation addressing the tangled history of the work Storage Piece and the process of unpacking, in particular, was produced in cooperation with the artist (text by Raimar Stange, design by Manuel Raeder) and published by Wiens Press, Berlin.
Another integral part of Storage Piece is a performance, in which actors introduce the work discursively. The performance (by Thaddaeus mMilinger) is held at the exhibition opening and can later be heard as an audio piece.