A project in collaboration with Ashley Berlin, as part of the exhibition »Clerks’ Quarters: Can There Be Forgiveness« by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw. There will be a concurrent opening in both venues. Ashley is located at Oranienstrasse 37, 10999 Berlin, across the street from SOX.
“Clerks’ Quarters: Can There Be Forgiveness?” is the second iteration of a new scenographic exhibition platform by Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw. A first chapter was held as an evening of performance within an installation by Shaw at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in March 2018. This forthcoming presentation at SOX, Pledge, will open as an annex to Shaw’s approaching exhibition at Ashley on September 27. To be followed by a performance evening on October 18 at Ashley, these three distinct moments together present an enduring transformative setting and storyline for Shaw’s intricate stagings, which are an immersive but delineated scenography.
Shaw stirs up the thematics surrounding the pioneering North American settler mythology, expanding its elements into realms of Protestant labour ethics, Roman Catholic notions of repentance and Buddhist practices of renunciation. This second rendition of “Clerks’ Quarters” looks towards familial, societal and devotional ideologies pertaining to guilt, acquiescence and reconciliation as a means of considering concepts of ‘forgiveness’. Through an installation that references a confessional stall, a museological display, and a town square, Shaw highlights the fallacy of intimacy, the permeability of truth, and power structures that can be built through fabricating the seen and the unseen.
Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw was born in 1987 in Edmonton, CA, and currently lives and works in Berlin. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions such as Clerks’ Quarters at KW – Bobs Pogobar, Berlin (2018), At the End of the Game You Will Be Forgotten at Alyssa Davis Gallery, NYC (2018), and Jugend ist Trunkenheit Ohne Wein at Bikini Space, Basel (2018). Selected solo exhibitions include F-150 at Polansky Gallery in Prague (2018), Benevolent Nerves at 427 in Riga, Latvia (2018), and Vinegar Stone & The Language of Flowers at Towards, Toronto, CA (2017). Shaw graduated with a Master of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2016.