Upon entering the exhibition space, one is immediately confronted with a sweating belly projected large-scale onto the wall: beads of sweat emerge from the pores around the navel. Only after a while does one notice that one's own body is also growing warm – and that two radiators are running along the side of the room. What Burning Stones: Hot Archives (2022) shows transfers onto one's own body. The sweating is a metabolic event – a circulation of heat, relaxation and fear – that corresponds directly with the video installation Burning Stones (2022) opposite. There, massaging hands palpate the tissue of a body.
Esther Yi-Chun Lin's video works are juxtaposed directly with one another for the first time at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Together they form a sweat chamber in which the human body becomes the object of a forensic investigation of the identity and history of Taiwan. They mark out a territory into which geography, memory and history have deeply inscribed themselves – traces that become symbolically and physically tangible through sweating.
How can history be felt?