04 Feb 2011

Carey Young: Memento Park at Cornerhouse, Manchester

Cornerhouse, in conjunction with Eastside Projects, Birmingham and mima, Middlesbrough, presents a major touring solo show by acclaimed artist Carey Young. This exhibition, reconfigured for each venue, surveys the artist's investigations of language, rhetoric and performance. The show features a newly commissioned video work Memento Park (2010), alongside a number of key video works and recent photographic, text and telephone works.

Memento Park (2010) extends and reframes Young's interests in performance, politics and leftist ideas. Filmed in a statue park in Budapest, which contains a large collection of monumental, Soviet-era statues containing in poses of 'suspended animation', we see the figures surrounded by bustling contemporary life passing by outside the park, which undercuts the statues' historical importance and impressive physical impact by giving them a provisional, peripheral context. Nevertheless, the seductive lushness of the surrounding greenery, shot mainly at the beginning and end of the day, gives these icons of propaganda a strange and beautiful serenity.

This exhibition also includes UK premieres of several works, such as Product Recall (2007), a video in which the artist undergoes a psychoanalyst session relating to contemporary advertising. Further works that complete the show include monitor based video works, I Am A Revolutionary (2001) and works from the photographic series Body Techniques (2007).

Carey Young's work focuses on the interconnections between economic systems, legal language and contemporary culture. Using a variety of media and settings she often uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm, altering them to create fictional and absurd scenarios which explore notions of performance, autonomy, criticality and imagination. Positioning herself as an insider to these predominant systems, she takes a stance between complicity and resistance as she criticizes them playfully through the use of their own methods and language.


Carey Young was born in Lusaka, Zambia in 1970 and is based in London, England. Her work has been exhibited in numerous prominent national and international exhibitions. Most recently, her work was the subject of one-person exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2010), Power Plant, Toronto and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (both 2009). Young's work has also been presented at MoMA/PS1 (2011), the New Museum (2011), the Taipei Biennial (2010), Tate Britain (2009), Moscow Biennale (2007), Modern Art Oxford (2007) and Performa 05, amongst others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Arts Council England and the Tate.

Tour
Carey Young: Memento Park will will be shown at mima, Middlesbrough between 31 March – 10 July 2011. www.visitmima.com

Publication

A new publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring texts by Berlin-based writer Jennifer Allen, writer and curator Raimundas Malasauskas and an interview with Young by American artist Jill Magid.


Exhibition and Memento Park (2010) co-commissioned by Cornerhouse,
Eastside Projects, Birmingham and mima, Middlesbrough.

Exhibition supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Memento Park has received additional funding from London College of Communication and the University of the Arts Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN).