Peles Empire: Even here, I exist

Barakat Contemporary is delighted to present the German artist group Peles Empire with the exhibition Even here, I exist from 12th March to 26th April 2020 for the gallery’s first show in 2020.

Peles Empire is a collaborative duo consisting of the artists Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff. In 2005, the artists visited Peleș Castle, Romania, where they were fascinated by the mix of historical styles. After photographing the interior of the castle, they began a collaborative project. The artists’ process of duplication experiments with the abstraction of the original, and the creation of a new original. The work shows and blurs the ordinary dichotomies and hierarchies between original and copy, historical and contemporary, elegant and lowbrow, and two-dimensional versus three-dimensional.

The group’s first exhibition in Asia, this show at Barakat Contemporary presents new works inspired by traditional Korean ceramics, including Goryeo period celadon, as well as a site-specific installation in reaction to the gallery space. Due to the tendency of the duo to have traces of past works reappear in new ones, this exhibition in Seoul will also be absorbed into the later works of Peles Empire and continue cultural hybridization in new areas.