Sophie jung

To learn that Sophie Jung was first trained as a photographer before shifting to installation, sculpture and performance could struck as a surprise, for her practice has so much to do with the unruliness of things. Where photography captures and catches (or at least tries to), Sophie’s work strives for release; the emancipation of things from ordering systems such as language, value and usefulness. In “Reifiction”, Sophie Jung showcases for the first time, alongside a set of sculptures and installations, a range of early photographic works. Given how well-versed Sophie Jung is into double-entendre and semiotic sabotage, one might wonder what this move entails. What did she learn about her practice by looking at the photographs? Or what is she hoping to learn?

Sophie Jung works with the abandoned and the left behind. Her sculptures and installations are always composed from an assemblage of found objects that she collects without a necessary preconceived idea of what she is going to do with them. That is the hoarder-gatherer phase. At the core of this process is an interest for the discarded, the thing that no longer has meaning nor usage (cue Baudelaire). Where this is usually considered negatively, Sophie Jung sees this lack of sense and absence of interest as potential for things to harness sprawling interpretations and conflicting stories. Hence the title of the exhibition – a sculpture in the form of an assemblage of words; reification and fiction – could be read as a statement in itself.

The photographs featured in “Reifiction” were shot back in 2009 and 2010, when Sophie Jung was following a communication design course with a focus on analogue photography in the vein of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work at the Folkwang in Essen. You could look at them as studies. More specifically studies on light, composition and perspective. Although they seem to deny the idea of a subject, they still hold the promise of a narrative. Sophie speaks about them as “sets primed for action” – past or upcoming –. She remembers one of her classmates at the Gerrit Ritvield Academie – where she studied afterwards – had noticed that all of them were focused on niches and corners (an impression reinforced in the exhibition as they are literally displayed in a niche). One could go on and develop a whole theory about the politics of the corner (maybe starting with Martin Kippenberger’s Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself, 1992; or even further back, Diana’s grotto).

For Sophie Jung, corners are forgotten spaces where dust grows and objects go to rest and plot their revenge. In that respect, it is not eccentric to argue that her photographs laid the ground for her sculptural practice, to claim that the two stem from the same attitude towards and perspective onto things, one that cares for the forgotten and the marginalised. In that sense, you might say the photographs could only reappear now, after a ten years + hiatus from sunlight, as they needed to be forgotten by Sophie for her to look at them again and give them new meaning. It is not surprising Sophie Jung turns back to things she had previously turned her back to. In “Reifiction”, the photographs are also shown with glass sheets on top of them, except that the sheets only partially cover the photographs. It’s as if they wanted to cover something else, another portion of the image, what could be and not only what is.

Coming from another deeper and bigger niche, a sculpture protrudes in the space. It is composed of four elements: a worn-down jet from a funfair ride; a bunch of pine tree branches from an overheated forest; Elsa’s castle from the Frozen universe; and another toy jet, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s starfighter. The noses of the two aircrafts – which have in common the ability to fly in space – seem to be holding the castle and blocking it at once. The wooden sticks, placed in the funfair jet cockpit in a way that makes them point at anyone who enters the gallery, like cannons, convey the idea that the castle is either under siege or defended by its surrounding vessels. As always in Sophie Jung’s work, the sculpture is generative of multiple stories and (re)definitions, breaking away from a simplistic dialectical reading. In this case, the shared foundations of any stories associated with the jets-castle-sticks work would be made of – not necessarily overtly – violent relationships and intricate power structures, which, by way of children’s toys, makes it even more unsettling.

Other works in the exhibition formally echo elements of the jet piece: rusty nails protecting a tower made of a sink stand topped by a small tv monitor displaying a video mixing Cindy Crawford exercising and a text piece by Sophie in the form of subtitles likens to the menacing wooden sticks; the pattern of the Missoni jacket carrying a picture of Sophie undergoing surgery – taken without consent by the surgeon – resembles the motifs of the Frozen castle façade. Beyond the formal artillery developed in the exhibition, there is something to say about the use of camouflage strategies and defence mechanisms to conceal certain things, to protect them.

Because gaze and language (which work hand-in-hand) have been weaponized to fix meaning and annihilate anything fluid and unstable, it is necessary to hide from them. In her performances, Sophie Jung uses language against itself, exhausting meaning, forcing the tongue to slip. In the visual realm, as much as Sophie Jung puts on a show, as much as she displays, she works towards concealment. As such, that she put her camera aside to work directly with found objects and give them agency isn’t insignificant. The question now is: could it be dangerous to be looking at Sophie Jung’s pieces? Do we run the risk of turning into deers when gazing at her works?

Cédric Fauq, 2023