Sung Tieu – Civic Floor

Sung Tieu - Civic Floor

Date: February 3, 2024 - June 1, 2024

Location: Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, 120 Navy Street, Oakville.

Drawing upon extensive research, Sung Tieu produces works of sculpture, drawing, text and sound. Her work explores questions of governance, civic responsibility and justice, and analyzes mechanisms of state control. Her research ventures into the quiet violence of bureaucratic systems in particular and how these systems impact people psychologically and emotionally. Her work has itself sometimes taken the form of reconstructions of sites of bureaucratic control and surveillance, even referencing her personal experiences with various administrative apparatuses.

The exhibition Civic Floor includes a new body of sculpture and wall-based works, which are accompanied by sound and video. In the exhibition, a series of steel sculptures makes reference to prison architecture from “radial" prisons first developed in the 1840s (and following the infamous Panopticon designs) to newer forms of prison architecture produced since the 1990s. These sculptures give one an intimate view of the brutal mechanisms of spatial organization and surveillance methods designed in tandem with the architecture. Each sculpture also contains earth that references each prison's location. The sculptures are accompanied by wall-works based on documents used to assess individuals' eligibility for immigration and asylum or those that act as appeals against deportation or for refugees to apply for a 'waiver of grounds of inadmissibility'.

Learn more about the exhibition here.