Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.
Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.
Location
Seoul
Dates
2023
Materials
ngie
To Fill in a Gap, To Plug in a Hole or How to Postpone an Imminent Problem begins with a fabricated premise: that a 3.9 km tunnel once connected MUDAS.MACM and Galeria dos Prazeres, with the wood-fired ovens found in both spaces presented as its surviving entrances. Textile panels and sculptural elements extend this fiction, treating an unverified narrative as if it were archaeological fact and testing how easily absence can be filled by a convincing structure.
The sculptures are made from wood marked by disease, its damaged surfaces concealed while the material continues to change internally. This tension between appearance and instability runs throughout the exhibition, where repair, omission and fabrication become ways of negotiating what cannot be fully resolved. By collapsing real and invented histories, the work asks when filling a gap becomes a necessary act of connection, and when it becomes a way of postponing a problem that remains unresolved beneath the surface.
