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Blaykyi Kenyah

Paperclips

2025
Leporello, 16 pages

Blaykyi Kenyah
Paperclips, 2025
Leporello, 16 pages / Exhibition view
Photo credit: Augustine Paredes

This work, a book of sixteen images with no text, takes as its departure point two ideas: the interplay of work and play, and the elevation of quotidian materials and gestures into high art. The sculptural objects made from paper clips are framed as what they are: small and frivolous. The images are made in my studio, at my work table, and the landscape image is one outside my window at work. With these choices, I aim to imply not the artist identifying with workers, but the artist identifying as a worker, like other workers– an overtly political gesture.

The elevation of the paper clip models also was an attempt to reflect on art as a mode of attention. How to harness the institutions of art and exhibition making to transubstantiate the everyday into high art is a current preoccupation of mine, and this work is a test of the belief that this transformation is a question of relation, between the artist and the object, and subsequently, the object and its audience.

In the recesses of my mind, Brecht’s exhortation about fun and seriousness not being at all contradictory was relevant during producing this work. So was Ed Ruscha’s famous photobook, Various Small Fires.

Exhibition history

2025
Rundgang, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste—Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Blaykyi Kenyah

Paperclips

2025 Leporello, 16 pages

2025
Leporello, 16 pages