Dérive Dérivée
CAB Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium
07. 10. - 19. 12. 2015

Exhibited works:
Urban Botany Maps, 2015
2/3/3/6, 2011

Sunah Choi works with photography, as well as sculpture, video, and installation. Her work deals with the notion of chance and is engaged in debates around cultural appropriation. Choi has experimented with cyanotypes (an image-making technique whereby ultraviolet light leaves pale shadows on photosensitive paper) to allude to the Surrealist photograms as well as the scientific practice of British botanist Anna Atkins who used this method first
to document her specimens from as early as 1843. The artist brings together different histories and ideas behind the technique to create something new. With a nod to Adkins, Choi makes cyanotypes with leaves she finds around the city, cracked and eaten in parts by insects, while she is drifting in a state of dérive akin to that of the Situationists’ wanderings. The images she creates are always a surprise, as they are the product of chance-encounters. In a new experiment, Choi has created a wallpaper from inkjet prints based on her photographs of enlarged advertisements depicting urban skylines. This functions as a backdrop as well as a reproducible digital image in contrast to the unique handcrafted cyanotype prints. (Angelique Campens, Curator)
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