The Giant’s Foot Scrubber

Gianluca Crudele, Alice Dos Reis, Chan Ka Kiu, Sissi Kaplan, and Andrew Luk

Curated by Aaditya Satish
Square Street Gallery, 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

To think about fiction is to think about what lies before and beyond it. It is to think through protagonists, conflicts, rising actions, climaxes. But to think about fiction with Ursula K. Le Guin—author, speculator, creator of worlds—is to think through potatoes and oatmeal and gourds and pouches instead. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin compares stories to gathering vessels, bags that carry grains that make a world. She writes, “Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.” She asks us to consider the myth (or the necessity) of the heroic protagonist and its ramifications. What kind of stories do we want told? Do we only want a story about triumphs? Do we want stories that create pedestals? Or do we want stories that are fashioned as carrier bags: intricately woven but holding things, one next to the other, as human lives usually are? 

Titled The Giant’s Foot Scrubber, the exhibition is an invitation to think through these questions in relation to the suspension of disbelief, the occult, and landscape. Within the walls of the gallery are works that ask you to speculate stories that could arise from the crevices of our surroundings: what worlds of fascination can be built from the observation of the seemingly small and mundane?

[…]

Sissi Kaplan’s Inflatables (2015– ) is an ongoing photographic series of portraits depicting covered vehicles in different parts of the world. Of the four photographs on view, two were shot in Cairo, Egypt, and two in Hong Kong. As a part of Kaplan’s intervention into the exhibition, the site-specific iteration of the series find themselves tacked to the wall, responding directly to the exhibition. Mobility, social and kinetic, are put on pause under covers in Kaplan’s elusive portraits, as the cars’ model and make are equalized and rendered indistinguishable from one another. They remain in place, tranquil, as movement is transferred onto the tarpaulin that becomes the subject of these images. A profound mystique is held together by this fabric: they breathe, as if inhabited by an anima, inviting viewers to imagine phantasmagorical projections and observe movement in stillness.

From breast milk and sauces to flowers and windows and fabric, The Giant’s Foot Scrubber is threaded with narratives that put minutiae at their center. Such objects become invaluable witnesses, or even drivers, of stories that surround us. Fiction is not just the imaginary or the untrue; it is possibilities and alternatives. To glimpse into, visit, and spend time in another person’s world is an intimate gesture that reminds us how we ourselves are vessels—baskets, bowls, and bags.

— Text by Aaditya Satish, full version available here.