GO (collaboration with Ina Jang), 2017—2019
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to announce GO, the first installation of photographs created by the collaborative duo known as CORAMU, curated by Yael Eban. CORAMU is comprised of New York based artists Ina Jang and Brea Souders, who have invented an ongoing competitive photographic dialogue inspired by the ancient Chinese board game “Go,” a game of metaphysical elegance with close connections to politics, economics, and the laws of nature. The strategic game begins with a white and black playing piece.
CORAMU has translated these playing pieces into white and black templates, used by each artist to make an opening move in the form of a photograph. The resulting images are exchanged simultaneously. Next, each artist must make one action to the earlier image in the swap. Like a film strip, each image builds on the previous. The process is repeated as each artist takes another “turn,” ultimately creating a chain of 50 connected images.
The resulting installation on view is a fluid and dynamic pictorial interchange, covering varying genres in which photography plays a role, including art, nature, fashion, surveillance, advertising, and forensics. We watch familiar objects like cellphone screens, magazine pages, postcards, stickers, and grocery lists weave in and out of the photographs. There is an element of surrealism and abstraction to the long horizontal scroll of imagery unfolding before the viewer, evoking the visual amnesia caused by social media feeds or manic television news cycles. Recent memories merge with the present, forming hybrid pictures. The artists conjure Roland Barthes’ iconic description of photography as a kind of resurrection—it continues after the subject is gone, taking on a life of its own.
At once humorous and weighty, GO is a commentary on the role of photography in the digital era, blending narrative, riddles, poetry, and current events, as interpreted by two collaborators engaged in capricious competition.
-2019 press release, written by curator Yael Eban
