Unindebted Life

2021 - Installation (Installation)

9:23 minutes

Sylbee Kim

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Sylbee Kim’s Unindebted Life is a single-channel video, commissioned and premiered at the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). This work is a major production by the artist, addressing her attempts to attractively integrate and intersect elements such as bodies and minds, ancient spirituality, heterogeneity, class and capital, digital temporality, and particular aesthetics of the post-internet generation. In the work, the vitality and the movement in calligraphy motifs, revealed through the flashing light presented in the screen panels and video sequences, are related to the moment of change inherent in the body’s cell energy and living things. The artist converts the fifth element of ancient times into light, wind, water, minerals, and derivatives to reflect the essential state of contemporary capital society. Symbolic and poetic verbal expressions that the artist wrote reflect uncertainty, a drifting life, a history of refusal, and a sense of non-belonging through constantly changing reality through technology, capital, and life sciences. The singing creates a temporal space for the body and mind that lives in the way they were born and raised, the work evokes spiritual connectivity for the community without a community.

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Sylbee Kim’s video installations reflect economic uncertainty and ecological urgencies through digital and physical compositions. Kim’s work addresses concerns about daily political and complex social issues through her experimentation with digital production processes, light, and sound. The verbal speculative narration in her works is also often weaved together with diverse bodies and portraits. Kim’s installations also involve rethinking display structures to produce a parallel reality that proposes different possibilities of audio-visual languages.

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Colors:

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• body.n.01
• spirituality.n.02
• class.n.03
• capitalism.n.01
• digital.a.03
• aesthetics.n.01