Opening Reception: Friday, 17 October, 2025. 7-10pm
Working collaboratively, artist duo HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander complicate the notion of individual authorship and bring the dynamics of relational interdependence—interaction, negotiation, and interference—into play with a wide variety of artistic media. As such, Kwon Kajander’s impulse is to work responsively: they confront the psychic charge inscribed in each form, its sense of expression, to provide a response in return. In their sculptural installation practice, the artists reconfigure, repurpose, and reorient that which is readily available into nuanced assemblages and arrangements. Their resulting artworks operate like chains of familiar yet incongruous elements, deliberately conjoined to evoke associations through slippery and contradictory signifiers.
Throughout their practice, Kwon Kajander engage expansively with the forces that shape contemporary life, paying close attention to materials and their attendant cultural histories. Their exhibition at Mercer Union, How Is Where You Are, takes up these interests by engaging with the inherited technologies that quietly organize our lives. The artists view these not simply as the tools we use to accomplish narrowly defined objectives, but the latent methods and systems that help to define and regulate society’s fundamental relationships.
Upon entering the gallery, several artworks remodeled from humble domestic fixtures—a fridge, a set of latrines, a cluster of lamps, a rug—symbolically set the stage within an amorphous interior. Kwon Kajander treat the notion of home as foundation-setting: it is the place from which we inherit and consume the understandings of who we are and where we have come from. These objects, however, are curiously glazed, stripped, reformed—uprooted from their functional context and juxtaposed with others that bring forth a different set of connotations. Appendages like phones and tablets (communications technologies) and flagpoles and border markers (symbolic representations of national identity and separation) create an unsettling effect. By collapsing the scale of the home, the corporate, and the nation-state, the artists produce a space of deliberate disorientation that antagonizes each object’s status.
The resulting installation includes sculptures spanning a diverse array of media like ceramics, porcelain, resin, and textiles, and introduces a new approach to video and sound into the artists' repertoire. A four-channel video installation—each channel displaying a moving image embedded in a sculptural body—is dispersed across the gallery. Assembled like a cast of autonomous characters, the videos present distinct scenes: an obscured view of Sigmund Freud's study, a Finnish waterfall harnessed for industry, a ticking metronome on a Public Standards of Length placard, and the slow drop of the Greenwich time ball. The vignettes are characterized by static, long-duration shots that build pressure towards a single moment. Subtly manipulated through in-camera editing techniques, the images call into question the apparatus of the camera itself and what it mediates. A dynamic industrial soundtrack weaves motifs from each video together. Through looped playback, variations emerge, and recurrent themes start to coalesce.
How Is Where You Are builds an underlying narrative that traces the idea of personal and collective lineage: how did we get here where we are now? Through references to imperial systems of measurement and arbitrarily drawn border barriers, the artists reveal the enduring legacies of empire that continue to govern us and the standardized ways of moving through the world that are passed on as immutable fact. Yet the artists also deny us simple conclusions, leaving narratives of origin deliberately unresolved, while allowing heterogeneous connections, new potentials, and the indeterminable to shift in and out of focus.
How Is Where You Are is the eleventh project in Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform and HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander’s first institutional solo exhibition.
