The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973).
For his new exhibition Immortality Project I at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore, sculpture Sam Jinks develops his interrogation of the human condition through Ernest Becker’s seminal text The Denial of Death. Becker’s concept of “the immortality project” is one in which the individual focuses on the symbolic self, generating a personal belief system that seeks to be part of something that won’t die with the physical body – something eternal.
Jinks highlights the limitations of the human experience as one that takes place within a vulnerable, aging body – a body capable of empathy, a body with responsibility and a body that is not eternal. The work of Sam Jinks reminds us that the texture of the body is harnessed to the texture of the psyche.
IMMORTALITY PROJECT I
SAM JINKS
10 JAN – 12 FEB 2017
SULLIVAN+STRUMPF SINGAPORE
