In Conversation: Jewyo Rhii

For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Ruba Katrib to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see.

Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations.

Love Your Depot (2019– ) is a large sculptural installation using principles of storage to activate a workspace for younger artists; Night Studio (2009–2011) developed through turning Rhii’s studio space into an open house; and the exhibition Of a Hundred Carts and On (2023) activated art storage systems to give a shifting tableaux of works new meanings through their mobile, expandable installation. As Rhii interrupts objects on their way to being stored, shipped off, filed away, or compartmentalized, she affirms material culture in its moments of incompleteness. By engaging with states of personal and material precarity, and casting artwork in relation to the (im)possiblity of its preservation, Rhii allows us to see how ephemeral structures in our lives build their own stories—and hold ours together.

In this program, Rhii speaks in particular about how her work uses sculptural machines and architectural storage processes to create new possibilities for collective storytelling. The event will also touch on the collaborative facets of Rhii’s practice, which often directs itself to local communities and artist groups.