PERPETUAL CONTINENT

Global trade and industry are a ubiquitous presence in our daily lives (just look at the origins of consumer goods on supermarket shelves). But they are also highly abstract entities, particularly in terms of scale and with an eye to their miraculous logistics. Ships are a key facilitator of global trade. Their cargo fuels Korea¡¯s export economy, for example, and delivers the raw materials necessary to sustain the country¡¯s ongoing modernization.Aranberri¡¯s installation conjures a museological image of Korea¡¯s modern condition. While it is impossible to grasp the monumental scale – and therefore actual impact – of the shipbuilding operation (statistical information and documentary projects have their clear limits, for better or worse), Perpetual Continent feeds the imagination with a display of hollow moulds. These forms are abstractions of abstractions. They are supplied by a shipbuilding company in Ulsan that builds ship models, or prototypes and replicas of actual ships for use in contract negotiations between the shipbuilding company and its client. But these ship models are no mere supplement. Their excessive shine and minute detailing puts them close to a fetish.The hollow moulds, on the other hand, are difficult to idealize.

The object that matters is gone, or so it seems; what they exhibit is mainly negative space. Still, this negative space points to more than just nothing or absence. Negative space is a key trope of early 20th century avant-garde art (in Malevich, for example). On the one hand, this trope encapsulates a gesture of radical nullification or tabula rasa: the negation of all traditions and established norms. On the other, it evokes a utopian promise: out of the negation of the old world, a new and better world will come.Modernity¡¯s utopian promise is becoming harder and harder to believe in. State socialist experiments failed horribly, and rampant capitalism causes ecological disaster. Could this be why Aranberri¡¯s piece looks like a necropolis?