Koo Jeong A: Prerequisites 7

Acute Art is delighted to present Koo Jeong A’s first augmented reality (AR) artwork Prerequisites 7 featuring her drawings in 3D and 2D, during the 58th Venice Biennale, May 8-12, 2019. 

The drawings are a collection of pen sketches from the artist’s book Nomos Alpha (2018) and her Instagram account. 

“Jeong A, whose ephemeral works highlight seemingly unimportant everyday items, often border on the invisible. Her precise drawings explore the poetics of everyday life in humorous ways. In the medium of AR her drawings take on new agency and in a dimension outside our physical space they become alive.” Daniel Birnbaum, Director of Acute Art 

These drawings will be superimposed around the My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point. Visitors will be able to view the works by pointing their phone in the direction of the My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point as they approach. Visitors are encouraged to download the free Acute Art app to participate in this AR experience and interact with the virtual creatures. 

The presentation of Jeong A’s latest work continues Acute Art’s mission of collaborating with contemporary artists, allowing artists to realise their creative vision into new digital mediums, embedding the use of future technologies in their artistic practice.

Koo Jeong A will also have a parallel exhibition presented by the KÖNIG GALERIE, as part of the “Asia Focus” programme of the My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point. The contemporary art gallery with locations in Berlin and London will present a pencil on paper drawing, a large-scale magnetic sculpture and an animated video work. 

About Koo Jeong A
Koo Jeong A has been working since 1990 on the reinvention of spaces with site specific works. Her works frequently include architectural elements, drawings, fictions, poetries, publications, installations, sculptures, films, audio works and architecture projects. Koo’s latest project is a glow-in-the-dark skatepark series. The first skatepark named OTRO was built in 2012 in collaboration with L’Escault Architectures, and was erected on Vassivière Island, France. The second, EVERTO, was built in 2015 in Liverpool, UK for the 2015 Liverpool Biennale; and most recently ARROGATION was built in 2016 in Sao Paulo for the 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo.

The work of Koo Jeong A incorporates derivative objects with the capacity for transformation, still and moving images, sound and scent. These disparate mediums are often combined with terrestrial/extra-terrestrial agents such as wind and gravity, and site-specific reconfigurations and interventions into architectural space. By placing these varying mediums into delicate and meticulous tension, Koo Jeong A’s installations trigger a certain energy in their encounter, asking the viewer to engage in a cryptographic unravelling of each artwork.

Often using commonplace matter in order to conjure alternative realities, Koo Jeong A traces a certain poetic within the inherent nature of forms that permeate the universe. By re-casting materials such as magnets, dust, cigarettes and unwrapped sticks of gum into unexpected orders and formations, autotrophic universes are continuously created. What underpins this transient approach to making is an interest in the minute details of our earthly environments and the cosmic constellations that simultaneously connect and expand them. Koo Jeong A traverses these details with a flexible, rational movement where order and disorder, perception and memory, beauty and practicality are always oscillating.

About Acute Art 
Directed by Daniel Birnbaum, Acute Art collaborates with the world’s most compelling contemporary artists, providing access to cutting-edge technologies that allow them to translate their creative vision into new digital mediums—including virtual, augmented and mixed realities.

A curatorial laboratory and research hub, Acute Art are committed to finding new ways to take digital artwork to the public, both physically, through exhibitions, and as a curated offer on the Acute Art website and free app.

Since 2017, they have collaborated with artists including Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Christo & Jeanne-Claude and Antony Gormley, as well as other talented and award-winning artists. 

Their curated offer is available through their website and the free Acute Art app, which can be downloaded via the App Store or Google Play, as well as Steam and HTC Viveport.

About KÖNIG GALERIE
KÖNIG GALERIE was founded in Berlin by Johann König in 2002, and currently represents 39 international emerging and established artists, mostly belonging to a younger generation. The program’s focus is on interdisciplinary, concept-oriented and space-based approaches in a variety of media including sculpture, video, sound, painting, printmaking, photography and performance.

About My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point
Lightbox established the Venice Meeting Point in 2015: a platform created to encourage an international dialogue in contemporary art, and foster the collaboration between visual artists, art organisations and the international arts community, cultivating a deeper public engagement in the arts. The Venice Meeting Point, just around the corner from the entrance to the Arsenale, is a private club, the Navy Officer’s Club, which exceptionally opens it doors for the 5 days of the Biennale openings—May 7-11, 2019—to friends and partners of My Art Guides. The Club offers a dense cultural programme, the 2019 main partner is MMCA Korea supported by SBS Foundation.