Ghislaine Leung. CONSTITUTION

About

Chisenhale Gallery presents CONSTITUTION, a new commission by Ghislaine Leung. Situated within the discourses of both artists’ moving image and institutional critique, Leung’s work is foregrounded by questions of agency, circulation and distribution.

Working with sound, scale and temperature CONSTITUTION builds on Leung’s ongoing enquiry into cancellation and withdrawal. Taking active cancellation in sound as an initial structure, Leung’s new body of work considers moves from closed systems to complex commons.

A new sound work explores the spatial possibilities of active sound cancellation, a method used in the design of noise-cancelling headphones in order to eliminate unwanted environmental sounds. In bringing sound cancellation into an open system, sound here is not isolated in fidelity, but is instead altered in volume and intensity dependant on the audience’s position in the gallery space. Architectural adjustments and a series of sculptures further question enclosure through the physical circulation of heat, light and power. While new smaller works consider systems of administration and management.

In this new commission Leung looks to what is at stake in forms of cancellation, exploring the interdependencies, complicities and reliances of how this act is not only produced, but constituted.

As part of the commissioning process, a series of discursive events have been programmed in collaboration with Leung and run throughout her exhibition. Leung’s exhibition commences Chisenhale Gallery’s Commissions Programme for 2019, which includes new commissions by artists Mandy El-Sayegh, Ima-Abasi Okon and Sidsel Meineche Hansen. Through her work, Leung contributes to new discourses on institutional critique, exploring issues related to labour and value, themes that recur throughout Chisenhale Gallery’s programme for 2019.