Carnations embodies a first critical reflection on the work of artist Philippe Hamelin. In this series of CGI animations, begun in 2012, Hamelin questions the ambiguous relationship between what is real, living and digitally constructed. Textured models of human, animal and organic forms, at times interrupted by geometric shapes or videotaped scenes, make for a strange and eerie world, the viewer’s experience of which takes on an affective quality that is both intimate and distanced from it. In the hazy constellation of categories—human, real, true—it is this paradoxical quality governing existence itself and our compliance with its limits that here become the object of reflection.

By situating his work in liminality, the exhibition reads Hamelin’s animated situations as threshold-spaces where images question their own status, and where physical and psychological identification unravels itself and is reshaped. Designed as a series of environments composed according to varying temporalities, the exhibition also aims to present the gallery itself as a liminal space.

The art historian Ji-Yoon Han will also contribute an essay to the exhibition.