“Riptide” sets out as a solo show by Korean-born artist Koo Jeong A, but opens up to include an assortment of works by nine artists responding to her pen drawing Civilising Process (2005), in which a giant bird in flight clutches a human figure. Here, translation is the main device and subject of the exhibition. In the process of translating, as words are copied, progress or evolve, there is an inevitable slippage of meaning and a loss of clarity with each new iteration or interpretation of the source material. The exhibited set of Koo’s line sketches, plucked from her book project Koo Jeong-A: R (2006), is appealingly enigmatic, appearing as a type of dream journal exercise or illustrations for a text that they have been detached from. For the show, the artist copied and enlarged these drawings, which reference the story cycle of 1001 Arabian Nights and its framing device of Scheherazade as the recurrent storyteller.

Civilising Process, based on Koo’s reading of the tale, is an illustration of the Roc bird in the Sinbad stories of The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights—specifically the version translated by Richard Francis Burton and published in the United Kingdom in 1885. Via Hannah Barbara’s cartoons and Ray Harryhausen’s cinematic treatments, Sinbad has become a thoroughly Hollywoodized character stripped of his Persian origins. This removal of cultural context is a theme of several works in “Riptide.” Koo’s picture is also an emblem for the exhibition, where content is carried by and passed between artists. Part of Kyung Roh Bannwart’s mixed-media piece, The Traces of Small Finds (2016), stands in a display case ringed by Koo’s drawings, and forms the strongest dialogue of the show. Switzerland-based Roh Bannwart sourced objects from the Mithraic cult, which were housed in a museum in Montagny. One such item is the relief of a scorpion, on which she pressed tissue paper to create a direct copy. This was displayed in a case next to later copies that were created by using rapid prototyping, which were then cast in metal. In these variations we see that the imprint of each generation becomes increasingly obscure. Mithraism originated in Persia and flourished two millennia ago under the Roman Empire before being overwritten by the early Christian Church, which absorbed many of its sites and rituals, including the date of Christmas. Roh Bannwart’s handwritten labels attached to the copies give a glaze of authenticity to the copies, which is at odds with their ambiguous identity—as the original objects that they are based on presumably remain in Montagny.