국립현대미술관

○ Kim Jisun <Deep Present>

Date | 2017. 10. 11. (Wed) 19:30 / 2017. 10. 12. (Thu) 16:00*
*Artist Talk
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Multi-Project Hall
Duration | 60min.
Genre | Non-human performance
Language | KR/EN

Can we fundamentally rethink our system? This question constitutes the core of Kim Jisun’s works; in <Well-stealing> she traced the cracks of the system, and in <Climax of the Next Scene> she sought after the exit of this system to imagine the world beyond. Extending this trajectory, <Deep Present> places ‘outsourcing’ as the key engine of our system and sees Artificial Intelligence as its ultimate product.
Outsourcing originated from the industrial sector to reduce cost and enhance efficiency. Such strategy has gone as far as delegating murder or outsourcing risk as shown in proxy wars. Ahead of us lies the final stage of outsourcing the last exclusive human ability: the ability to reason. What questions do we need to raise at this time point? This replica of our intelligence becomes a mirror to spark fundamental, yet pressing questions about ourselves and the present society. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Contemplations, questions, dreams arising between these two worlds of minds will come across, collide, glimmer and disappear on stage.

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○ Lawrence Abu Hamdan <Rubber Coated Steel>

Date | 2017. 10. 12. (Thu) 14:00-15:45 / 2017. 10. 13. (Fri) 16:00-17:45
       *Screened together with <View from Above>
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Film and Video
Duration | 21 min.
Genre | Video
Language | KR/EN

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has expanded his critical investigation on the intersection of sound and politics through various forms; audiovisual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, potato chip packets, essays, and lectures. He has made audio analyses for advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International.

‘Rubber Coated Steel’ presents a fictitious trial of an actual murder case. in May 2014, two unarmed teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher, were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank (Palestine). The case hinged upon an audio-ballistic analysis of the recorded gunshots to determine whether the soldiers had truly used rubber bullets, as they asserted. Rubber Coated Steel does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence, questioning the ways in which rights are being heard today.

○ Hiwa K <View from Above>

Date | 2017. 10. 12. (Thu) 14:00-15:45 / 2017. 10. 13. (Fri) 16:00-17:45
       *Screened together with <Rubber Coated Steel>
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Film and Video
Duration | 11:23 min.
Genre | Video
Language | KR/EN

Born in Kurdistan, Hiwa K lives and works in Berlin, Germany after seeking political asylum. He creates works that address cultural paradoxes through references consisting of stories told by family members, friends, and found situations. ‘View from Above’ reveals a situation where issues of safety and danger, life and death are dislocated from the reality in the midsts of political turmoil in the Middle East.
In 1991, a division was created between northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and the rest of Iraq. The UN considers Kurdistan a safe zone. In reality, the safe zone is nowhere close to being safe. To qualify as a refugee you have to come from the unsafe zone, or at least prove that you do. The work deals with a story about someone who we will call M, coming from the safe zone trying to seek asylum in one of the Schengen countries. He needs to prove his ‘unsafe’ life at the entry interview, aligning his perspective of the ‘unsafe zone’ with the judge’s view from above.

○ Padmini Chettur <Varnam>

Date | 2017. 10. 13(Fri) 14:00* / 2017. 10. 14. (Sat) 17:30 / 2017. 10. 15(Sun) 14:00
*Artist Talk
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Seoul Box
Duration | 60min.
Genre | Dance

Padmini Chettur began her training in the traditional Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam. Beginning her own artistic research, she departed from the classical repertoire of gestures, posturing, and mythical tales, to shape her own alternative, condensed language of dance. At this juncture of her life, ‘Varnam’ marks a significant revisit to Bharatanatyam for Chettur.
In the history of any specific language of the body, in the transmutation of gesture, in the evolving physical aesthetic of dance, Chettur reads layer upon layer of colonial and post-colonial narrative. During the post-independence period of India, Bharatanatyam was adjusted to convey divinity, virtuosity and unquestionable Sanskritised discipline. Through unfolding layers and numerous deconstructions of what will finally barely be recognized as Bharatanatyam, the work unfolds as an interrogation and subversion of cultural beliefs in religion, sentiment, love, and sensuality.

○ Royce Ng <Ghost of Showa>

Date | 2017. 10. 14. (Sat) 19:00* / 2017. 10. 15(Sun) 12:00
*Artist Talk
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Multi-Project Hall
Duration | 50min.
Genre | Video, Performance, Dance
Language | KR/EN/CH

Royce Ng works in digital media and performance, dealing with the intersections of modern Asian history, trans-national trade, political economy and aesthetics.
‘Ghost of Showa’ narrates the life of Japanese bureaucrat, colonial administrator, economic planner, war criminal, and prime minster Nobusuke Kishi. In the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo between 1935-39, Kishi created a model of syncretic economic philosophies, combining German industrial cartels with Taylorist assembly lines and Soviet Style central planning. Although his experimental state failed to be realized in Manchukuo, Kishi would live to see the East Asian tiger economies like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea adopt the state authoritarian capitalist development model. The piece takes the form of a lecture/performance accompanying a 3-channel 3D animation, borrowing its visual style from the 1920‘s erotic graphic vocabulary of Japanese shunga prints and the decadent ero-guro nanesensu images from the 1920's which formed the subversive cultural parallel to the violence inflicted at pre-war Japan's colonial periphery. This phantasmagorical retelling of 20th century East Asian political economy summons the ghost of modernism that continues to haunt Asia.

○ Koo Jaha <Cuckoo>

Date | 2017. 10. 14. (Sat) 15:00 / 2017. 10. 15(Sun) 16:00*
*Artist Talk
Venue | MMCA Seoul B1 Multi-Project Hall
Duration | 60min.
Genre | Video, Lecture Performance
Language | KR/EN

Koo Jaha has been attempting to dissect the Korean society through different angles of history, culture, and politics. For him, 고립무원, a feeling of “helpless isolation”, is characteristic of the life of the younger generation in present-day South Korea. Structural problems such as youth unemployment or sexism are dismissed as individual problems, and a military, hierarchical social order knows no room for rebellion, expecting submissiveness towards the powerful. Increasing suicide rates, isolation, a fixation on personal appearance, and the omnipresence of technology are just some of the symptoms of this condition.
Koo Jaha experienced isolation for himself one day when his electric rice cooker’s speech function informed him that his meal was ready – in “Cuckoo,” rice cookers are now his only co-actors. Supported by the hardware hacker Idella Craddock, he transforms several rice cookers into speaking performers. Together with them, he takes us on a journey through the last six hundred years of Korean history, combining personal experiences with political events and food cultures with world views.