Sun Kim

Conference Report. November 2023

Sparkling rays of sunlight hit our eyelids and the post-conference in Salta has begun. Throughout the journey to Kafayete Valley, the unique plants shine in the sunlight. All these different species coexist with respect for their distance. I am reminded of Buenos Aires, where each block has a completely different appearance, yet harmonizes organically. There is a term "crown shyness," where trees leave space for other trees to grow. With the economic and democratic crisis in Argentina, the public's fears are becoming more acute. Not only in Argentina but also in Korea and Japan, the politics of "survival" are increasingly generating public "anger" and "hatred." Sometimes, as a foreign woman, it is very difficult to breathe in this dense temperature of negative feelings. How then can the institution make a generous "crown shyness" spacetime over this darkness? How do we exist with others in the museum, as a vulnerable existence to be objectified with hatred?

I am co-founder and director of (O)Kamemochi, an arts collective founded in Tokyo of women with mainly an interdisciplinary and intercultural background. Japanese society is still very conservative and male-dominated, so as young women working in the arts field, we have to deal with various difficulties such as institutionalized funding processes and the top-down system of venues. We must use stronger binary words and more masculine attitudes to convince in order to get through those hardships. The saddest thing is that it was happening not only outside but also inside the collective – our thoughts and language were already contaminated by the masculine dominant system. Reflecting on this, our next steps were to create a co-learning space to practice “respect” and “caring” for ourselves and others in a feminine context by relocating the feminine values of empathy, intimacy, love, and sisterhood. In this process, we are moving upstream from the veiled feminine languages and expressions of history.

Marie Hélène Pereira's keynote speech on the second day permeated our activities, describing how institutions bear witness to and mediate the memory hidden by silence, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation. She showed a wonderful video work touching the unspoken memory of Vietnamese migrants in Senegal, The Spector of Ancestors Becoming, by the Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. There was a feminine performative moment when the Senegal descendant brushes the Vietnamese grandmother's hair. Their memory is narrated by the descendant’s voice, so that, depending on the direction of the camera, it sounded like the voice of the grandmother, an unknown ancestor’s ghost, or the descendants' inherited memory. This intimate and feminine act of touching another’s existence creates a nonlinear spacetime to recall unspoken others. This traverses Simon Njami's keynote on the first day, where he referred to the limited form of institutional time. This phrase reminded me of institutional temporality, where the flow of the past is present and both exist in their own territory, such as in Alfred Barr's diagram. In this intact temporality, however, there is no stunning illogical moment when a hidden memory suddenly erupts unconsciously, the sensible perception of the particular moment, the ghostly moments when the past came to us. In this temporality, only visible things are more visible. Visibility accelerates the logic that identity equals the visible and subordinates us to the reproduction of capitalism. It makes us vulnerable existences to be gazed at – linear, vanishing point, and porn. The institution never gives back what we want, only an objectified reflection, and we are isolated by not seeing ourselves and seeing others.

That is why we need a feminine performance as shown in the video work. When this feminine performance turns out to be a language to convey the memory of an individual and it travels through the non-linear temporality of others, the artwork itself becomes fiction to help us imagine the names of unnamed individuals. We need feminine performances that imagine fiction, reweaving the gap between what we cannot see and what has been shown, and the patience to search and listen. This feminine performance comes when we form a sisterhood. According to María Belén Correa's keynote speech about Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, they formed their own sisterhood to preserve their heritage from being expelled by a patriarchal and male-dominated society. This sisterhood created an intimate archive where they supported each other's autonomous choices. This sisterhood is not a blood bond, but one of caring with responsibility and empathy, and patient remembrance.

It should not only be a concept but be practically implemented in the working space. Art should be a liminal language to communicate with others from non-linear, invisible, and unspoken spacetime. The institution should create a space where this language can be activated, based on sisterhood to grant autonomy to co-learn and practice care of the self and others with a healthy distance. In this sense, this conference validates the activity of our collective but also reconceives the inside and outside of the institution. I am very grateful to my sponsor, the Byucksan Cultural Foundation, for giving me the great opportunity to reconceptualize my values. I would also like to express my gratitude to all those who have worked to make this timely conference a reality.

Bio

Sun Kim (b. Seoul, Korea) is a curator and director who imagines polyphonic and porous narratives that can unveil marginalized memory, senses, and language in society.

After graduating from the Korea National University of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she then joined the curator team at Art Sonje Center where she discovered her passion for curation. Realizing the deep relation between Korean and Japanese social-politic and cultural relationships, she decided that in order to fully explore her identity as a Korean curator, she should expand her scope and include the Japanese curatorial perspective. As such, she decided to further her education at the Tokyo University of the Arts where she is currently undergoing her Master’s in Curation. Until now, she has directed and participated in various exhibitions as a director, and curator, and space designer in art and community spaces, schools, and alternative spaces in both Korea and Japan. Her recent representative exhibitions and art projects include “The Reconstructed History of Coming into Being” (Taki Plaza, Tokyo, 2022) 1DAY Performance 表現街 - “Jelly Bean Mapping - Please Name Me" (Senju Honcho Market Street, Tokyo, 2022), Sophia Refugee Support Group Charity Photo Exhibition – “HOME” (Just Another Space, Tokyo, 2022), “Crystal Clear “(Nakacho No Ie, Tokyo, 2022) and “Virtual Bodies: Absence/Presence in Media” (Chinretsukan Gallery, Tokyo, 2022). She is an active member of international experimental group “Performance Lab” and a founding member of international collective “(O)Kamemochi”.

Throughout this experience, she questions the boundaries of existing contemporary curation practice especially regarding social-cultural memory, and how to convey this as a sensory experience. Recently, she has begun experimenting in merging these questions with her own interest in inherited memory from her grandmother’s generation. Specifically, she focuses on exploring alternative curatorial methods in order to express suppressed or traumatized memory of East Asian women, which although her generation has never experienced, they can sense, like a ghost. As a culmination of this research, she directed the interdisciplinary exhibition. “Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing” from 1st June to 4th June 2023, in Tokyo.

In this project she elicited and shared a personal fiction based on intergenerational memories within Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier, an amalgam of traditional Japanese and modern architecture. The distinct point of this project was that the artworks were curated around the aforementioned personal fiction, with the performance and the soundscape weaving various artworks within this narrative, all interwoven and presented in the format of a haunted house, enabling an exploration of metaphysical, socio-political, and intimate postmemories. Her team named this format a Performative Walk-through in which soundscape and performance embodying the narrative guided the audience members through the exhibition. In this process, performance and soundscape not only conveyed the narrative or theme of this project but also actively gave breathtaking moments of resonating with artworks within the audiences’ memories. In doing so, each work was tied into a larger narrative of personal stories about inherited memories and emancipation from the past. At the same time, the dense layers of each artwork sang their own voices.

Through this project, she pushed the boundaries between exhibition/performance, Personal/Public, and Fictional/Fact. Based on these experiences she keeps exploring questions of these issues on performative curatorial practice with a connection between her psychology and interest in post colonialism. Recently, as series of this exploration she held the talk event “Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws : Performative Curation in Mediating Personal Narrative-based Exhibitions Toward Porous Memory.” In this talk event, she shared her exploration of new discourse with a global panel from theatre side and museum side.