BROOKLYN, NY – Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to announce GO, an installation of photographs created by the collaborative duo known as CORAMU, curated by Yael Eban. CORAMU is comprised of New York based artists Ina Jang and Brea Souders, who have invented a competitive photographic dialogue inspired by the ancient Chinese board game “Go,” a game of metaphysical elegance with close connections to politics, economics, and the laws of nature. The strategic game begins with a white and black playing piece. CORAMU has translated these playing pieces into white and black templates, used by each artist to make an opening move in the form of a photograph. The resulting images are exchanged simultaneously. Next, each artist must make one action to the earlier image in the swap. Like a film strip, each image builds on the previous. The process is repeated as each artist takes another “turn,” ultimately creating a chain of 50 connected images.

The resulting installation on view is a fluid and dynamic pictorial interchange, covering varying genres in which photography plays a role, including art, nature, fashion, surveillance, advertising, and forensics. We watch familiar objects like cellphone screens, magazine pages, postcards, stickers, and grocery lists weave in and out of the photographs. There is an element of surrealism and abstraction to the long horizontal scroll of imagery unfolding before the viewer, evoking the visual amnesia caused by social media feeds or manic television news cycles. Recent memories merge with the present, forming hybrid pictures. The artists conjure Roland Barthes’ iconic description of photography as a kind of resurrection—it continues after the subject is gone, taking on a life of its own.  

At once humorous and weighty, GO is a commentary on the role of photography in the digital era, blending narrative, riddles, poetry, and current events, as interpreted by two collaborators engaged in capricious competition.

Ina Jang graduated with a BFA in Photography in 2010 and completed her studies in the MPS Fashion Photography Program in 2012 from the School of Visual Arts. Her works have been shown at internationally acclaimed galleries and festivals, including the New York Photo Festival, Daegu Photo Biennale, Paris Photo, Unseen and Flatland Gallery in Amsterdam. She was a Foam Talent and a finalist at the Hyères Festival in 2011. In 2016, Photo District News announced her as one of the PDN 30 Emerging Photographers. Her latest project “Utopia” was shown in 2017 at Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle in Switzerland, followed by a solo exhibition at Foley Gallery in New York last year. Her works have been published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, British Journal of Photography, IMA Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.

Brea Souders is a visual artist whose work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at Abrons Arts Center, Bruce Silverstein Gallery and Baxter St at CCNY in New York, as well as the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, France, the Wellcome Trust, London and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives, Canada. She has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a fellowship with the Millay Colony of the Arts and a residency and grant with CAMAC / Fondation Ténot in France. In 2018, her third artist book was published with Silent Face Projects. Souders’ work has been profiled in the New Yorker, ARTnews, LA Review of Books, New York Times T Magazine, Elephant and the Jeu de Paume Magazine. Her work is included in several survey publications, including Photography is Magic, published by Aperture and Feelings: Soft Art, by Rizzoli.

CORAMU is a collaboration between artists Ina Jang and Brea Souders. Formed in the summer of 2017, they are engaged in many projects that combine their interests. CORAMU expires on March 20, 2020.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s 2019 Exhibition Program is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).