Lim Jeong Soo
The Legs of a Whale
7. 3. – 30. 3. 2025
opening: 6. 3. 2025 from 6 pm
curator: Eva Koťátková
Whales with Legs
The whale’s legs are treading on the bottom of an undiscovered world. They lie beneath the surface of what we see and what we know intimately as a possibility and as a reminder that our bodies, our small and large worlds in which we live and which we shape, are constantly in motion. They are in a permanent state of formation and transformation, in a relationship and they are never separate and never static and always, repeatedly without a name. And this uncertainty is our nature, something that keeps us alive, even though we have never been taught to.
The whale's feet remained on the shore, discarded as something unneeded, useless. They were found there by humans who attached them to their bodies like hunting trophies. They used these to assert their dominance over animals. Even the whales have given us their legs, they cried out, give up your feet and we will spare your lives, give up your instincts, you won't need them anymore. We will designate space for you to move in, we will tell you what is good for you and where it is safe for you.
The whale's legs are walking along the shore calling out to the whales that have freed themselves: hey, where are you swimming to, are you serious? Have you thought your decision through? Do you know that the others are doing the exact opposite and doing everything they can to get out of the ocean? Are you lost and going the wrong way? Don’t you like to have solid ground under your legs? How else can you justify throwing away your own hooves to navigate uncertain waters?
The whale's legs have transformed into mermaids' tails to remind us of the limits of our human imaginations and projections, of our desperate attempts to name and classify when we see something unknown. These mermaids are not waiting for salvation. They do not want to trade their scaly bodies for human ones. They are not interested in adapting or re-educating themselves. They cut our imagination with their fins to show us that our laboriously constructed, fabricated images are useless when we try to approach beings that are more-than-human. They teach us that it is possible to live side by side even if we know that many aspects of their lives will remain hidden from us.
Lim Jeong Soo has been exploring the possibilities of deepening, or better yet transcending interspecies relations, the question of becoming an animal, a plant or something beyond categories and species, for some time now. In 2017, she created the performance Becoming Your Street Tree or Becoming Your Fence of Veranda, in which she navigated the human body towards the plant body, tracing the limits of human anatomy and movement. In other works, she explored how to temporarily become the exhibited object, or she took pictures of the Skin of the Room of her room to observe their emotion and expression. She created a shell object that conformed to the shape and movement of the human body, or conditioned the performance of another object by requiring it to be worn simultaneously by two human bodies in close physical contact with each other.
She is interested in flowers, both living and artificial, and the possibilities of imitation; she writes a story about flowers that wanted to become more flowers; she explores whether the shadow of a tree can be an independent entity. The objects called Prey use the shape of the artist's hand, which is mixed with the shapes of animals: sea animals, carnivorous plants, birds. A recent sculptural series, Pile of Skins, uses the forms of enlarged animal and plant bodies – their insides and their skins - and points to the interconnectedness of these bodies as parts of a larger ecosystem, a planetary body in which the bodies of one become the bodies of the other, dissolving, blending, flowing into one another.
In her thesis Galapagos Finches Lim Jeong Soo focuses on dinosaurs as representatives of creatures that are located in the space between real animals and imagination. She explores the representation of these monsters (characters outside the norm, beings that are similar to us but also possess unknown parts that can never be fully known and understood) through symbols, stories and different kinds of representations, to ultimately attempt to find intimacy through performativity and corporeality.
Lim Jeong Soo transformed the space of Galerie Jelení into a whaling workshop of shapes, forms, skins and other props. She is preparing for a performance that will take place on the last day of the exhibition. She does not dissect the whale, but creates new body parts, extensions and variations of her own body to get closer to the whale. She shapes, reinforces, applies layers, adds to her own body and takes it off again. She observes what makes which shadows, and what creates which illusion. The whale's body, spread out in space, gradually gets used to the human body - this familiarisation and bonding will take almost a month.
Lim Jeong Soo collects facts and myths. She tells multi-voiced stories that challenge the idea of evolution as a one-way process. She is drawn to beings that humans and their language cannot fully perceive and understand. Animals live beyond their names whether we like it or not. How can we free ourselves, at least for a moment, from the normativity of language that human hierarchies suggest, and try to connect differently with the natural world? How can we refrain from being afraid to put our legs aside?
Eva Koťátková
transl. Vanda Krutsky
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Media partners: ArtMap, artalk.cz, jlbjlt.net, ArtRevue, Radio 1
