The End is Where We Start From, 2024

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. These lines by T. S. Eliot from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, written in London in 1942, provide Anne Duk Hee Jordan with the title of her first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The end is where we start from articulates a circular motion that she evokes in the exhibition space both thematically and physically. According to the artist, who was born in Korea in 1978 and raised in Germany, “to fully understand ecology we need to think in circles without interruption.” The exhibition, which she developed specifically for KunstHausWien, consists of two worlds, each of which takes up one floor of the building: the Archean Eon, the period of time when life first emerged and an atmosphere of breathing, as well as a magically fluorescent underwater world that allows visitors to dive into the depths of the ocean, which is populated by fantastic creatures and microscopic phytoplankton. There, visitors encounter fluid worlds, rich in oxygen, inhabited by living organisms and lifeless materials. Mirrored walls create a visually unstable, perpetually reflecting setting for films, sculptures, and sounds. Kinetic sculptures—or “robotic critters”—sing, dance, and make distracting noises. Everything is interwoven with one another; no element is stable or isolated. Visitors engage in a dialogue with natural phenomena, technology, and art. Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s ecological-utopian exhibition welcomes us into an artistic universe inspired by marine life, geology, sexuality, reproduction, and symbiosis. Employing the beginnings of time and space, she asks: Who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going? The exhibition The end is where we start from is a meditation on a life-long, never-ending journey. Travelers already undergo a transformation upon their arrival—or to invoke the words of Eliot and the motto of Mary Stuart: In my beginning is my end.