LINDA ZEB HANG
A Cooling Nest for All Kinds of Speech, Lamentations, and Ecstatic Forms
ASSORTED PUBLICATIONSCULPTURES, DYADIC FURNITURE, WAVES OF LIGHT, AND OTHER SUPPORTIVE MATERIAL
A Cooling Nest . . . is a microcosmicroom (or a pocket universe) for classes of study and rites. It contains different languages—publicationsculptures—as a gateway to kinds of knowledge drawn with the body, in collaboration or cultivated solitude, with transparency or in private. This knowledge is broadcast through different matrices in printmaking and waves of sound and light. Pockets of sub-universes are arranged to allow for certain relationships to take shape within it and because. It’s a library of sorts, an artery area, mostly cool memories, with spots of far infrared heat as color. People don’t interpret heat in the same way, but comfort, to me, is a cool temperature.
MICROCOSMICROOM is assembled with artwork by LINDA ZEB HANG and an extended network of collaborators for Ultradependent Public School co-convened by CLARA BALAGUER—curator of BAK’s civic praxis program—at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utretcht NL.
GOOF KLOOSTERMAN
Collaborative MICROCOSMICROOM exhibition scenography
THOMAS TAWANDA ORBON
JANGLE film production, editing and sound
TOM PHILIP JANSSEN
MICROCOSMICROOM installation photos
JANGLE, 2023
1:27 min.
Single-channel video installation
BW, stereo
Director: Linda Zeb Hang
Production, editing, sound: Thomas Tawanda Orbon
I dance to remind.
I will create as I speak.
I seek the simple and interpenetrating shapes. Processing with imagination, I’m interested in who, how and what gets left behind.
My research is built from resourceful memory, in which orality is a primary cultural script. The frayed, layered aesthetic language of my reprographic culture is not fixed—I can reinterpret, repeat, distill, generating a mixed-media synthesis.
For me, the hinge in comfort and grief holds density in texture. Geometry in sound and voice soothes this altered condition of life.
Linda Zeb Hang
Spring Equinox 2023
Pocket I : Warble
2020–2021, HAND-WOVEN FIBER-OPTIC PAPER
WARBLE is an artifact of intimacy, hinge, and shadow. This process of repetitious folding yields a jointed architecture held together without adhesive, through gravity. The talismans of migrant cultures place importance on woven entry points: they hold significance as a marker, symbol for an exit, an architecture for one’s return to the world. In protection, this undisclosed design forms another “eye,” or a nest for meditation and restoration. As a geoglyph, it can be thought of as a braided crater.
Petch-Lite, I
Star-Tent, I
Star-Tent, II
Shoulder-Rotator-Cuff
Diamond cartouche furniture
Artery Area, I
(Somnambulist reflections :; deflections)
The fiber-optics of place, an artery area, a micro-climate theory, spacecraft language, and calyxes of meditation.
Human body parts are strewn about in this ordinary, yet rare feminist read. The technologist’s reliquary. A lullaby for the unborn (an empty nest). Dislocation of the adaptationist divine, and into the Diamond Mind 2.0, cutting thru all illusion.
I can feel something within this cold code. A recognito scene, cool memories, and September blues.
Artery Area, II
Knee-Ligament, I
Diamond cartouche furniture
Lullaby, I
Lullaby, II
Parasite
Pocket II : QALDERA (I–III)
2020–2022, HAND-WOVEN MESH CANVASES, CARVED NEGATIVE SPACE, RAINBOW GRADIENT ACRYLIC YARN
QALDERA is a hand-carved typeface, improvised in a trio of slipcase books constructed from easily accessible materials found in craft stores. The letterforms reference traditional and exquisite Southeast Asian reverse-appliqué needlework. They are formed by research into the industry of Hmong refugee labor within Amish quilting communities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Thread-splitting, architectural schema, distortions found in monograms, and whipstitching—typically used to close seams—have been employed to bring relief and color to the slipcase surfaces. Hand-beaded currency tokens accompany QALDERA: trading and marking altered labor within precarious identification.
Pocket III : Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine (I–III)
2020–2022, FLASH-FICTION PUBLICATION
ROTR-BM (I–III) reflects on the shapeshifting and sensorial identities of language, the voice in speech, as it gathers and moves in-between marginal and non-marginal gait. With its eight poems, this book of flash-fiction and emotion provides a way of looking at empire—the Ego, the Environment, the Complicit—processing with imagination what we search for after trauma, loss, or injustice.