Emilie Ding

January - March — Visual Arts

Born in 1981 in Fribourg, Switzerland Emilie Ding, borrows the language of forms and elements taken from the fields of architecture and civil engineering in her practice.

“So far my practice has strongly referred to the theories as well as consequences and failures of the modern architectural avant-garde. Mostly I find inspiration in specific sites that are testimony to a certain way, located in the past, of thinking the present, but also the future, and the idea that we are still interacting with the different temporalities superimposed in these sites today,” says Ding.

While on residency in Johannesburg, she would like to spend time observing a system she has never been part of before: “…the architecture and spaces resulting from the violence imposed by political programmes are of special interest to me, namely the multitude of architecture types (such as shacks, matchbox houses and hostels) that are a direct repercussion of the apartheid period and its aftermath,” she says.

Ding is also particularly interested in Johannesburg’s central business district, in its embodiment of white people’s ideology and domination, and its transformations and different uses in the context of white flight and urban blight in the latter decades of apartheid and the post-apartheid period.

Ding has studied at Universities of the Arts in Biel, Bern and Geneva. Her solo shows include Books of Sleep(2016)  in Geneva, The Walk (2013), at Galerie Samy Abraham, Paris and One Must Have A Mind of Winter – And Have Been Cold a Long Time (2014).