Can there be Forgiveness?
Ashley, Berlin
27.09 – 21.10.18

Curated by Kate Brown and Lauryn Youden.

Can there be Forgiveness? is the second iteration of a new scenographic exhibition platform by Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw. The first chapter was held as an evening of performance within an installation by Shaw at Bob’s Pogo Bar at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in March 2018.
 

The concurrent presentation at SOX, Pledge, is conceived as an annex to the exhibition at Ashley Berlin. A performance evening, Acting Press: Clerks' Quarters II will take place on October 18th, 2018 at 8PM at Ashley Berlin.
 

Together, these three distinct moments present an enduring transformative setting and storyline for Shaw’s intri-cate stagings, which are an immersive but delineated scenography. Shaw stirs up the thematics surrounding the pioneering North American settler mythology, and expands its elements into realms of Protestant labour ethics, Roman Catholic notions of repentance and Buddhist practices of renunciation.
 

This second rendition of Can there be Forgiveness? looks towards familial, societal and devotional ideologies pertaining to guilt, acquiescence and reconciliation as a means of considering concepts of 'forgiveness'. Shaw’s installation is at once a confessional stall, museological display, and town square, highlighting the fallacy of intimacy, the permeability of truth, and power structures built through fabricating the seen and the unseen.