Episode 10: Kara Chin – Concerned Dogs

In a space that appears a cross between a cinema and a place of worship, a warped soundscape, a raucous video and doggy dioramas immerse us in Chin’s fictional and unsettling world

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London
29 July – 3 September 2023

by TOM DENMAN

To feed ourselves a caricature of a disaster ostensibly greater than that which the planet actually faces, all the better to distract us from that real and imminent threat, is arguably the key attraction of most, if not all, blockbuster disaster movies. And a white man running from a giant espresso cup spilling red liquid – as seen in Kara Chin’s 2023 digital animation Inaugurare – is an apt metaphor for this kind of escapism. In an absurdist key, it enacts the avoidance of the humanmade problem and the fact that this is not the real issue at hand. In light of the exponentially growing urgency with which our collective responsibility to avert environmental catastrophe is being called on, Chin’s exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) critiques commercialised inattention by intertwining two themes: cinema and (pet) dogs. Pets, too, represent a particular ecological relationship. How Chin conceives of this domestic point of contact between humanity and nature is wildly ambiguous, just as it should be – all the better to entangle us in the knotty collapse and re-establishment of this binary that loving a pet entails.

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

The installation occupies one of the double-storeyed rooms of Goldsmiths CCA’s old bathhouse building, converting it into a cross between a cinema and a place of worship. There is also a science fictional dimension involving dogs (as well as, to a lesser extent, birds and cats), rendered with – and as – various kinds of technology. Four individually lit, knee-height structures (which I am about to find are quasi-representations of dogs) are laid out on the floor; high up on the far wall, a screen is projected, showing the aforementioned man running for his life. Two trompe l’oeil images of flocks of birds against a blue sky – a digitally rendered, pseudo-photographic image that also appears in the video – are illuminated, like clerestory windows, on the wall adjacent to the screen. Beside them is a balcony from which to view the installation from above. Filling the room, as part of the video but hauntingly disembodied, is a warped soundscape.

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

The floor is covered in red carpet, thick to tread on, running up a part of the wall; it allows me to kneel, so I can take a closer look at the sculptures: rows of cinema seats in dollhouse miniature, complete with detritus – discarded vape pens, empty crisp packets, soft-drink cups and cans – are stacked on boxes on stilts. An overgrowth of weeds indicates that the seats have long been out of (human) use. Flames leaching to the sides of some of the structures signify apocalypse; their abstraction and sheer weirdness make them atemporal, as markers of a disaster already happened as well is its continuing effects. In three of these microworlds, a plaquette with a painted portrait of a dog takes central position – and now they resemble tombs, miniature pyramids. The baseball cap worn by one of the dogs, and the domestic setting of another, suggest they are, or were, pets; Chin does not conceal the human imagination’s influence. I tilt my head to peek through the transparent doors and windows in the hollow, interiorly lit structures supporting the cinema seats: a water bottle, a mug, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. On the ceiling: photographs of cats … Wait. Did I just enter the (humanly imagined) canine unconscious?

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

The light from inside each box illuminates an image on one side (behind and below the seats), like a displaced cinema screen. The two that show a dog’s face looking directly outwards transform the structures on which they appear, when seen from this angle, into dog-headed machines. Especially since the other two show a dog’s full body from the side and (yet more enigmatically) a blurred library shelf – and the illuminated dogs do not seem to match the ones on the plaquettes – this playful gesture eludes interpretation. It would be too literal to conclude that they were robotic pets informed by cinema, or literature. And yet, in a general and unrestricted way, they could speak to the artifice of our variable and comforting interpretations of the non-human. Our overindulgence in a particular kind of cuteness – in our imposition of this value on animals without listening to them – can distort our view of nature to catastrophic effect. This is not to say that Chin is telling us to boycott pet Instagram accounts, but her work seems to channel a need to integrate this same love of animals into a broader ecopolitical outlook.

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

As I study the minutiae of Chin’s doggy dioramas, her raucous animation looms over me. The discrepancy in scale between the two throws into relief the proportional relationship between the dioramas and us, and thus our power over, and responsibility for, their subjects, both the dogs and the environment. The video’s hero, or the “badly rendered figure of Tom Cruise”, as the gallery’s website describes him, spends much of his time in flight, running towards the “camera”, and away from various objects coded into the mise en scène of Armageddon: a beaker of water that turns red (into blood?), a transparent espresso cup and saucer, a ball of fire, a teaspoon with a block of green jelly on the end of it. These shots are interspersed with shots of birds flying, occasionally forming esoteric symbols and dispersing again, as if nature or the universe were trying to communicate something. Man runs from a perceived disaster, although in the sky behind him are also potential messages of guidance, and, in the form of magic staffs twirling in midair (like “pick-ups” in computer games), he might also have the tools to communicate back.

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.

On adjacent walls, some distance from each other, are two small ceramic slabs, each one corniced by strange flames – squiggly embodiments of Chin’s unabashed, maximalist whimsy. In one, a pair of eyes looks out from a rearview mirror; through the windscreen pours red and green rain, fiery and poisonous. They are dog’s eyes, “concerned” as per the exhibition’s title, which sums up its ethics of attention. Which seat the dog is in – driver’s, passenger’s, or back – is hard to tell, but the narrative I have automatically formed tells me the dog is picking up on something humans cannot, either because we are blind to what is happening, or because we do not exist; perhaps, through some kind of projective identification (which is sort of what I am doing when I recognise concern in the animal’s eyes, and what Chin might be doing in her depiction of them), or by other means, we have become dogs. This is storytelling operating by way of open-ended clues, inviting us, too, to be whimsical, to let the imagination freewheel, but also – and perhaps more urgently – to be concerned.

Kara Chin, Concerned Dogs, installation view, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris.