The Box Project 2014: Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) has represented the Argentina Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and has had solo exhibitions at various prestigious museums.

Port of Reflections is the largest and perhaps the most ambitious site-specific installation work that he has ever created in his entire artistic career. Erlich subverts the mundane quotidian space into a fantastic world of surprises and paradoxes by juxtaposing reality and illusion, the real and the unreal, representation and ambiguousness, thereby constructing a unique vocabulary on his contemplation of the world.

Seoul Box is the most spacious and serves the role of navigational center in which viewers can efficiently access the other exhibition spaces in the museum. Incorporating these spatial characteristics, Erlich has created an anonymous beautiful floating harbor where the ships moor and the lonesome street lamps guard the port in which the spectators will see the corporeal reflection of boats suspended in the air. Upon entering the museum through the lobby, the viewers will first encounter the work on the ground floor which will instantaneously arouse their curiosity due to its scale as well as its amazing enactment of imagination.

Seeing the physical doubles with the illusion of liquid movements floating in the space will stir up a dreamy landscape where the viewers are guided through a bizarre experience where the real and the unreal, or the real and the illusory, are exquisitely blended in surreal yet ambient surroundings. At the same time, Port of Reflections occasions the physical, cultural and social relation between Korea and Argentina, two countries that are geographically located diametrically opposite to each other, and by extension visually alludes to the relations of polarity and union of all the nations around the globe.