Like a Urinal in a Nightclub
Taipei Contemporary Art Center
2.24-3.11.2018
Taipei Contemporary Art Center
2.24-3.11.2018
“You came and went. Here I was, taking in your silence and your chatter. Names were exchanged, titles never mentioned again. I thought about what you just consumed and what you were letting out, some golden liquid turning into another. You were like a filter, matters passed through you and became a part of you. I am but an ingredient interpreter, your secrets are safe with me. It would just be like confiding to a treehole – we all know that treeholes stay silent.”
— Note on the wall in a restroom of a Taipei nightclub
Like a Urinal in a Nightclub is commissioned by Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) as a part of its 2018 program, 2 Weeks. By collaborating with artists, curators, writers, stage directors, and a variety of creative practitioners, 2 Weeks attempts to reimagine space as a medium and a proxy for generating uncertainty, scenes, and timeline.
An imaginary urinal in a nightclub functions as a point of metaphorical departure in Like a Urinal in a Nightclub. It is a mechanism for receiving, analyzing, and producing substances, an object alluding to organs and living beings. The preface to the project describes a certain “golden liquid turning into another.” This process directly illustrates a clubber’s cyclical drinking-urinating behavior, but more importantly suggests the presence of a vehicle for transformation – the human body. Such a vehicle becomes a “filter” and a metaphorical facilitator for material transformation, within which lies lost and obscure information waiting to be examined by the artist.
Materials and meanings progress and mutate constantly in Like a Urinal in a Nightclub. The main piece Water, Malt, Hop, Rice, Yeast takes up the entire space of TCAC, where a surrogate fluid made from ingredients found in beer coats the gallery floor, creating a sticky sensation that incites a particular bodily experience of clubbing when walked upon. Instead of harvesting meaning from accumulating and manipulating found objects, this piece unpacks and alienates everyday items through processes of deconstruction. It complicates our understanding of objects and materials in attempts to imagine new material languages and ways of perception.
Color is a key component to this project. Phenolphthalein and pH indicators are applied to surfaces treated with acidic and alkaline substances to cause color change. Beverages that could tint the color of urine are served during the opening, soliciting a collection of urine samples from the audience that could then be displayed chromatically on a designated shelf in the gallery. These color variations serve as a form of index in this experiment.
floor plan
