Reading Environment | Ana Iwataki, “A Plural Singular”
Ana Iwataki’s reading environment, A Plural Singular, explores the dialectics of desire and consumption as they relate to the process of writing. Her presentation of titles on-loan to the 3307 library collection draws a parallel between the processes of translation and digestion, so that we may consider the latent eroticism of taking in another’s words, or, as Iwataki writes, “foreign bodies,” for the expressed purpose of reformulation. To build upon this inquiry, Iwataki herself becomes a subject of the re-scriptive act, offering her residency components to an intimate group of past and current collaborators for translation via linguistic, sculptural, and performative modes. Her curatorial statement, biography, and bibliography are available in English, French, Spanish, Danish, Japanese and Korean, while her reading environment contains a sculptural rendering of her residency themes created by artist Benjamin Reiss. For her public program, Iwataki has written a performative text composed of fragments from titles in the 3307 permanent collection library.
While translation is often undertaken as a kind of communicative service, the translator inevitably brings her own subjectivity to bear upon the translation’s final form. A text like Iwataki’s bibliography may necessitate a straightforward transliteration, but the poetic nature of her curatorial statement offers space for interpretation and re-imagination within the target language. Pushing this idea across media allows us to question the range of intentions—from “faithful rendering” to the somewhat adjacent notion of “adaptation”—that propel the translator’s desire (and, perhaps, revulsion) to re-present. Thinking about the erotics of writing in terms of “emptiness” and “fullness” provides insight into the degrees of incorporation we allow when working in concert with others, as well as how this affects our notions of originality and authorship often attached to the act of writing. From this context, we can further question the values and terms of cultural ownership and, perhaps, destabilize the desire for experiencing not only our production, but also our selves, as discrete entities.
Printouts of Iwataki’s translated curatorial statement are available in the 3307 Reading Room in addition to on the website.
TRANSLATORS
Danish
Amalie Brandt lives and works in Paris. Since 2016 she has been a co-director of the exhibition space Shanaynay in Paris, FR. She received a MFA from École nationale supérieure de beaux-arts de Paris.
Sculpture
Benjamin Reiss (b. 1985, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. With a sculptural practice based as much on research as a wide range of materials and fabrication techniques, he explores the limits of understanding and agency, the unconscious, and the drive for narrative constancy in a globalized and often nonsensical world. His work has been recently shown in exhibitions at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (solo); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; Actual Size, Los Angeles (duo); and 247365, New York. He received a BA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Writing Table: 16 x 23 x 47 in., pine, oak, basswood, MDF, paint, glue, steel
Spanish
Natalia Rolón is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on the complexity of image-making and storytelling. She combines painting with other practices such as installation, writing, staging and sculpture.
Japanese
Naoki Sutter-Shudo (b.1990 in Paris, FR) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He has recently shown artworks at Crèvecœur, Paris (solo); Sydney, Sydney; Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles; Carl Louie, Ontario; Bodega, New York (solo); The Steakhouse Doskoi, Tokyo; Ashes/Ashes, Los Angeles; The Sunroom, Richmond, VA; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA; and Mortadelle, Arles, France. He is the co-founder of Holoholo, a publishing house based in Paris, and the exhibition space Bel Ami in Los Angeles.
French
Marion Vasseur Raluy is an independent curator and critic. From 2014 to 2016, she co-directed Shanaynay in Paris, FR with Ana Iwataki. They have also worked together on the exhibitions u at Utopian Visions, Portland, OR, 2018; Windowlicker, Balice Hertling, Paris, FR (curated with Julie Beaufils), 2018; Luca Francesconi: Eternal Digestion, 67 Steps, Los Angeles, CA, 2018; Beloved in the Landscape, Bel Air, Essen, Germany, 2016; Nothing Recedes Like Failure, Mortadelle, Arles, FR, 2016; and Some of My Best Friends are Germs, le Doc, Paris, FR, 2016, and Les négligences volontaires, Shanaynay, Paris, 2016. The anthology of their year-long Art Viewer Screen Series program was published by Holoholo Books, Paris, in 2018. She is a regular contributor to 02 and the Quotidien de l’art.
Korean
Haena Yoo (b. 1990 in South Korea) is an artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2017 and her BFA from Ewah Woman’s University in Seoul, South Korea in 2013. Yoo makes installations constructed with found materials, video, sound, and smell, exploring themes of labor, identity, and global capitalism. Her art practice is a tinkering process. She is interested in the urgency created by limiting materials to what is at hand, showing the archeological and socio-political status of the maker. A recipient of a 2018 Emerging Artist Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Yoo recently presented work at Awhrhwar (Los Angeles, CA), and La Croix (Pasadena, CA), and exhibited at Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, Leroy’s and AALA in Los Angeles, the Greater Los Angeles MFA exhibition at California State University Long Beach, the New Wight Biennial at UCLA.
Read her CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Download her BIBLIOGRAPHY
View her PUBLIC PROGRAM