Exhibition text and related events (PDF)
Perishable substances, from deep-fried flowers to recalled powdered milk, potato chips, or snail excretions, are the Korean-born artist Anicka Yi’s (b. 1971) medium of choice. They are also the building blocks for her peculiar brand of techno-sensual alchemy, which assaults the senses as much as it traffics in a strange emotional charge. The exhibition 7,070,430K of Digital Spit looks back at her practice via a vast new project spread across and imagined for the entire ground floor of Kunsthalle Basel. This show self-consciously acts as a coda to five years of production and exhibition making that has been organized around very personal subjects such as denial, divorce, and death. Yi now tackles the matter of forgetting by creating new work that refers to and takes up themes from her past production and incorporates an exhibition-specific smell—the scent of forgetting—which wafts through the galleries. The exhibition is accompanied by (and in a sense built around) a new artwork-as-publication impregnated with the scent of forgetting—its pages are meant to be burned after reading.