INVENTORIES

Arnold DreyblatT

21 April - 16 June 2023

Ways we remember history, collect memories and hold on to information is a reflection of the present more than a representation of the past. If the past and present seep into each, how does one reinvent the inventory as a record of past lives? The artworks in the exhibition INVENTORIES confront the reproduction of a past that has been observed through singular perspectives and told with condensed words. Through the archive as a memory we seek evidence of the stories that have passed and people who are beginning to be forgotten. The multi-disciplinary artist Arnold Dreyblatt interrogates these ways of remembering and the archive as a space. In his installations of information and text he poses the question of how information and stories are told, saved and erased and why certain information persist over others. One gazes upon the letters and digits that fill this exhibition and realizes that information floats through and transforms our world and our consciousness. As the mind attempts to focus, isolate or connect the textual fragments in the exhibition they stand as a union that lifts these components taken from documents, records, and inventories into a metaphorical sphere. 

KANG Contemporary is pleased to present the exhibition INVENTORIES with Arnold Dreyblatt, which showcases recent and rarely exhibited works. The artist engages with categories of intertextuality, recollection and archival storage in complex textual and spatial visualizations. New lenticular and glass display cases reference crises of Europe in texts by historical and recent visionaries and critics. These important historical themes are illustrated to visitors through new media and means of technology. The exhibition INVENTORIES is thus intended to create a space in which these themes, guided by the artist's works, can be reflected upon and discussed by the public.

EXHIBITION TEXT