The Fountain

Casemates by Ivan Cheng (1991, born in Sydney, based in Amsterdam) merges a performance series with an interactive installation, co-commissioned by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes.

A casemate is the name for the bombproof chambers of a fortress, designed to surround and safeguard value. The proximity of both museums to historical forts and their casemates forms the point of departure for Cheng to probe questions of storage, preservation and transformation. In Luxembourg and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, these defence infrastructures have become renowned tourist sights today. The project expands the artist’s quest into shifting tensions between information systems and histories, machinic and human forms of memory, and a sense of the self fused with technology like phones, computers and cameras.

With the new commission, Cheng directs each visitor’s attention to the maintenance of their own ‘casemate’. The public is asked to reevaluate their own digital archives of valuable and trivial files stored on their devices or in online clouds – such as photos, videos, notes, songs, voice memos, chats, emails and more. On site and remotely, Casemates prompts visitors to exhume and discard the ‘waste’ of their archives, and collects it in The Reservoir, the artist’s digital dumpster.

To inspire contemplation of The Reservoir, a performance titled The Fountain is repeatedly offered in the space – an entertaining romp between a public and private computer. Evolving as the project travels, this collected data of The Reservoir will inform the fifth instalment of Confidences, Cheng’s ongoing series of novels on vampires and time-based practice.

Cheng’s Casemates invites the public to reflect on what we deem meaningful and what we keep but no longer need, while highlighting the influence of technology on memory. While doing so, the artist playfully gives visitors the chance to revive their waste files, granting them a novel presence.