Overview 

'Mutual Obligation' is the current name for the Australian government's 'work for the dole' program, an arguably pointless exercise of forcing 'the poor' to work that serves as the point of departure for this sculptural installation by Koji Ryui. Drawing the somewhat appropriate tradition of Arte Povera, Ryui's Mutual Obligation employs a range of found and cheap - or, more ideally, free - materials in an attempt to create monuments to contemporary living, an exercise which, through the ephemeral and formless nature Ryui perceives in sculpture and society alike, is programmed to result in failure. Moreover, Ryui regards sculpture itself as maintaining certain obligations to mutually contrasting conditions simultaneously, embodying slippages between subject and object, between positive and negative space, between the familiar and unfamiliar.

Embracing these perceptual slippages, Mutual Obligation refers playfully to various understandings of recognition and representation in inanimate objects, from animism to hallucination and daydreaming. Whether the work appears simply as a collection of materials, as abstract forms or as representational figures, it occupies a moment in which a thing becomes recognisable or unrecognisable.