For Paris + 2022, Marfa’ is proud to present Caline Aoun’s project, Matters of Duration.
Aoun’s work addresses the traffic and the undercurrents of the hidden physical world around us. She encapsulates these intangible connections by revealing how the accumulation of material happenings through time can leave deposits and traces, otherwise kept invisible, and change what we see or how we see. In this installation, she presents moments of friction with a series of experimental arrangements using natural and mechanical processes with materials from inkjet printing and nature; images and objects that reveal the cycle of their own making, so that data, be it information or image, can be seen and felt again. The different works are part objects in time rather than space, suggesting fractured rather than continuous time, isolated from the past and the future.
On the walls, a series of prints are made from overprinting monochromes of Cyan ink for up to five hours on the same surface; as a result, the paper is covered with a thick velvety accumulation of pigment, as well as artefacts of the printing process, such as horizontal striations, and lighter vertical lines that mark the path of the printer head, like tire tracks. Their composite character is revealed at the edges of the print due to slightly imprecise registrations between sequential layers. In this work, Aoun foregrounds the vibrancy of matter as an antidote against the digital dematerialization of everyday images. Each print is titled with the colour of the ink used and the exact duration of printing, for example, Cyan, 4 Hours and 42 minutes.
In the middle of the space of the booth, a fountain is circulating CYAN printer ink instead of water. The fountain refers to the idea
that data circulates like water, emphasising a cyclical process of creation, stagnation, and transformation, as well as creating a gathering place in the space. Aoun has always assimilated the printers in her studio to be like water fountains, but bathed in ink; ink, which is 90 % water, travels through pipes and pumps from one container to another only to finally be sprayed from “the fountain” onto a surface. As the fountain circulates ink, it marks a duration through the splashes it creates around it, creating a ring that gets larger and darker, measuring the duration of its installation in the fair.
On the back wall, a cotton fabric hangs, which has been dip dyed with ink. The ink used in this work is the one that the printer in Aoun’s studio discards and accumulates inside an integrated bottle over time. In other words, it is the excess of the ink that the printer had dumped, during its printing and self cleaning processes. Through dyeing the fabric with this ink, Aoun attempts to dissipate the ink again and spread it on a surface as much as possible, a gesture of renewal.
Elsewhere on the walls, paper tiles reveal on their surfaces a negative pattern of foliage. Aoun placed a silicone sheet on the floor outside her studio in the mountains in Lebanon, and has kept it it for determined periods of time letting the leaves and pine needles from the surrounding trees fall onto its surface. After a specific number of days, Aoun would press paper pulp from leftover paper from her practice onto the surface, creating an imprint marking the accumulation of foliage specific to a duration. The final result looks like fossil, suggesting a time where paper will become obsolete , and nature, which is continuously under threat.
