Gayle Chong Kwan: Waste Archipelago

New photographic, paper and installation works, created from food waste and other organic elements, weave osmotic dialogues in the exhibition space: cut-outs and fragments, peels and scraps, collages and photographs are the starting point for a reflection that extends to colonial expansion, the exploitation of natural resources and ecological disasters.

Winner of the 2019 Sustainable Art Prize, Gayle Chong Kwan has worked for more than a year with students and academics at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, with the aim of exploring theories, conceptions and perspectives on these issues, and then developing a project that focuses on waste as a virtuous matter that permeates everyday life.

The solo exhibition at the Venice gallery is closely linked to this research, which it deliberately echoes: an immersive and enveloping show in which the central concept of the archipelago aims to bring out, visually and conceptually, the interconnection between actions and ideas that humanity enacts and elaborates around waste and residue. Chong Kwan explores the central role of the body and its relationship within a natural system of correlations, and the potentials that this perspective can offer.