Sophie Ernst: Home
Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK
17 March - 1 July 2012
SOPHIE ERNST: HOME in the Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Photo © Jonty Wilde - Courtesy YSP
YSP presents the first solo exhibition in the UK by Sophie Ernst. HOME is a major ongoing project confronting political turmoil and displacement with individual memories of home and ideal places. Ernst interviews people forced to leave their homes due to political upheaval, such as during the Partition of South Asia in 1947, and builds an architectural model of the houses they describe. She then projects onto this sculpture video footage of the person's hands as they describe their memory of that building, transforming the inanimate object into a virtually inhabited space, and ascribing a profound intimacy.
YSP is committed to supporting and articulating sculpture practice as well as effecting change on an individual and social level. During the exhibition, Ernst will develop a new sculpture. For this project she will work in collaboration with Taha Mehmood, the YSP Learning Team and a group of young people from YSP’s Shared Horizon initiative which works with unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK.
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| SOPHIE ERNST, Home, 2012 Published by YSP |
A book documenting HOME with essays by Iftikhar Dadi, Taha Mehmood, Helen Pheby and Sophie Ernst as well as commentaries on HOME by Nazmi Al-Jubeh, Yazid Anani, Kamila Shamsi and Salim Tamari was published by YSP.
ABOUT THE ARTIST SOPHIE ERNST
Born in 1972, Sophie Ernst first trained as a industrial mechanic with BMW before graduating from the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2000. She won the Golden Cube award at the 26th Kassel Dokfest awarded for best installation. Sophie Ernst works between Asia and Europe and was Assistant Professor at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (2003-2007). The exhibition is sponsored by The Mondriaan Foundation with support from the Dutch Embassy in London. The HOME project is made possible by the support of Green Cardamom, Sharjah Foundation and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Sophie Ernst is represented by Green Cardamom Gallery, London and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Sophie Ernst’s exhibitions include Presence of an Absence, (Ernst & Mehmood) at Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden; Emerging Discourse at Bodhi Art Gallery, New York; Re-Forming Landscape at the National Art Gallery, Islamabad; Best of Discovery at ShContemporary, Shanghai; The Punjab: Moving Journeys at the Royal Geographical Society, London; Sophie Ernst: Lovedolls at the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Munich; Along the X-Axis - video art from India and Pakistan at Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi; Touching from a Distance at Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG
Yorkshire Sculpture Park's website: www.ysp.co.uk
