Artists

Justin Caguiat

Press release

Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Tokyo, Japan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between architecture, spirituality and the rituals embedded within everyday urban infrastructure. Change Ringing brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film in a site-responsive installation. Working with the gallery’s architectural and infrastructural features, Caguiat presents a new series of thermochromic paintings that continuously change in response to heat and light. As temperatures fluctuate, layers of heat-sensitive pigment reveal and conceal different forms, creating works that remain in a constant state of transformation. Throughout the exhibition, a series of bronze bells cast in the shapes of various flowers and plant seeds ring in continually changing sequences. The score, composed by Lily Pickett, draws on the principles of English ‘change ringing’, in which bells play mechanically in a continuous loop as pistons fire in sequential code. Echoing the concrete acoustic mirrors built along Britain’s coastline to detect warships and recalling Le Corbusier’s conception of architecture as an acoustic receiver, the gallery’s walls gather and amplify the bells’ chimes, transforming the space into a listening instrument. The exhibition builds on ideas first explored in Caguiat’s project Zodiac Machine, organised by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo across the Santa Ana y la Esperanza Church in Madrid, the nearby Moratalaz Market and surrounding public spaces. Zodiac Machine took inspiration from the Spanish architect Justo Gallego Martínez’s Catedral de Justo, which he designed and built single-handedly using only recycled and found materials. Building on these ideas of devotion, architecture and materiality, Change Ringing considers how buildings accumulate memory, ritual and acts of transformation. Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, and Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large, Architecture and Site-specific Projects, with Alexa Chow, Assistant Exhibitions Curator. Zodiac Machine organised by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and produced by Isabela Mora.