Ornaments of Property is a modular sculpture and 16mm film loop that explore discarded technology as both material and cultural artifact. The sculpture is composed of hundreds of collected DVD/CD drives used as unitary bricks, forming mural fragments that create mixed ornamental languages—stripped of original cultural or national genealogy through time, space, and artistic reinterpretation. These modern ruins transform the devices into archaeological artifacts: fossil-like remnants encountered in museums or excavation sites, with emptied containers revealing how memories contain and are contained. Digital archiving technology itself becomes a cultural object where fact and fiction merge into new architectures.
The accompanying 16mm film loop, divided into five chapters, extends the sculptural work. Filmed in digital video and transferred to analog film, it depicts the DVD/CD murals in motion, contrasting material bricks with immaterial files. Ruins morph from ancient architectures into floating spaceships, animating discarded technology with mystery, animism, and commodity fetishism. The film and sculpture together trace the transformation of objects, memory, and ornament across space, time, and medium.
For further readings Surface Structures: Memory, Mimicry, and the Non-Archive by Alena Alexandrova
Ornaments of Property was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
Ornaments of Property, Weingruell, approx.. 160 cm x 15 cm x 35, Weingruell, Karlsruhe, DE, 2014
Exhibition view: Friendly Pattern II, (in collaboration with Flo Maak), Galerie Bernard Knaus, Frankfurt, DE, 2018 (Photo: Flo Maak)
Ornaments of Property, approx. 300 cm x 280 cm x 50 cm 2015, Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, DE, Bernhard Serexhe (Curator)Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (Co-Curator)
Exhibition Exhibition view, Ornaments of Property 2015, Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, DE, Bernhard Serexhe (Curator)Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (Co-Curator)view, Ornaments of Property 2015, Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, DE
Exhibition view, Ornaments of Property 2015, Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, DE, Bernhard Serexhe (Curator)Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (Co-Curator)Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, 2015
Ornaments of Property video stills
'Transfer Korea/NRW', National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea, Seoul, 2014, curated by Sooyoun Lee
'Transfer Korea/NRW', National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea, Seoul, 2014, curated by Sooyoun Lee
'Transfer Korea/NRW', National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea, Seoul, 2014, curated by Sooyoun Lee
'Transfer Korea/NRW', Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2014, curated by Stephan Berg, Volker Adolphs
'Transfer Korea/NRW', Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2014, curated by Stephan Berg, Volker Adolphs
Ornaments of Property versions, built in Ilsan studio, Seoul
