Song E Yoon – Songs Across Time
Evento Collaterale.
Comunicato stampa
The Foundation of Art NYC presents Song E Yoon: Songs Across Time as a Collateral Event of the 61st International Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Seohyun Kang, the exhibition features works by Song E Yoon and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, exploring humanity’s engagement with memory, recording, and the passage of time. Set within a historic Venetian space, visitors can experience the exhibition in a context that reflects the city’s rich cultural and architectural heritage.
The history of humanity is, above all, a history of communication. Long before the emergence of writing, humans marked the world – cave paintings, symbolic carvings, gestures and sounds – not as decoration, but as records of their relationship with the cosmos, the divine, and one another. Songs Across Time traces this impulse across cultures and millennia, asking whether the primal desire to find direction has ever truly ceased.
Song E Yoon's petroglyph-like paintings and installations gather ancient human symbols and re-inscribe them through luminous marks across walls and space – constellations of signs weaving together 10,000 years of human history. Lines intersect like star charts; fragments of characters and mythological figures overlap, producing an environment in which past, present, and future appear simultaneously. At the symbolic center of this work is Polaris: the fixed point that guided ancient navigators and nomads, and through Song's work, a living metaphor for humanity's enduring quest for orientation.
In dialogue with Song's work, the exhibition presents a selection of pieces by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Côte d'Ivoire, 1921–2014). Bouabré dedicated his life to safeguarding the oral traditions of his community, culminating in the invention of the Bété Alphabet – a prophetic system of pictographic symbols designed to make memory permanent. Signing his work "Cheik Nadro – The one who does not forget", he described himself simultaneously as artist, recorder, and prophet. His hundreds of hand-drawn cards function as archival objects and as the blueprint of a language still coming into being.
Together the two bodies of work stage a dialogue across cultures and generations. Bouabré's alphabet constitutes a "language of recording"; Song's installations, a "language of journey." One preserves memory in symbolic form; the other reopens paths of exploration.
The exhibition moves from the threshold before language is fully formed toward a direct encounter between Bouabré's pictographic cards and Song's Song E Code, a visual language of dots, forms, and intervals that produces meaning through relation rather than through sound. Moving between them, the viewer follows the gap between sign and voice, discovering that there is no completed language — only relations and states that remain for a moment, with meaning emerging in between.
The exhibition moves from the threshold before language is fully formed toward a direct encounter between Bouabré's pictographic cards and Song's Song E Code, a visual language of dots, forms, and intervals that produces meaning through relation rather than through sound. Moving between them, the viewer follows the gap between sign and voice, discovering that there is no completed language — only relations and states that remain for a moment, with meaning emerging in between.
