Perishable substances, from deep-fried flowers to recalled powdered milk, potato chips, or snail excretions, are the Korean-born artist Anicka Yi’s (b. 1971) medium of choice. The exhibition 7,070,430K of Digital Spit looks back at her practice via a vast new project spread across and imagined for the entire ground floor of Kunsthalle Basel. This show self-consciously acts as a coda to five years of production and exhibition making that has been organized around very personal subjects such as denial, divorce, and death. Yi now tackles the matter of forgetting by creating new work that refers to and takes up themes from her past production and incorporates an exhibition-specific smell—the scent of forgetting—which wafts through the galleries. Gigantic inflatable pods and sculptures reflect the artist’s penchant for combining dissonant materials. The exhibition is accompanied by (and in a sense built around) a new artwork-as-publication impregnated with the scent of forgetting, which is meant to be burned after reading.
WHERE Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, CH-4051 Basel
WHEN June 2 – August 16, 2015
*Image: Courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel
