O (for various skies)
2021 - Installation (Installation)
10:27 minutes
Jesse Chun
O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ). As part of the installation, video projections are paired with mirrors on the floor: drawing from Korean shamanistic uses of the mirror as a sacred object that reflects, holds, and protects. The columns onto which the videos are projected are activated as portals. By erasing, redacting, and abstracting bureaucratic and homogenized language about the moon, Chun rewrites imperialist language into non-linear poetics. Presenting language as a constellation of semiotics, Chun’s work reflects on earthly and celestial bodies, entering and leaving of the world(s) and language(s), and other existential provocations.
Through video, drawing, sculpture, sound, installation, and publications, Jesse Chun’s multidisciplinary practice critically engages with the politics of language. Mobilizing staunch research through conceptual frameworks, Chun manifests new and intentional (mis)translations of the poetic, the opaque, and even the untranslatable. In her projects, Chun often incorporates found bureaucratic documents, as well as the hierarchies and histories of language. In an effort to undermine colonial narratives and subvert linguistic imperialism, Chun’s work reimagines the hegemony of language in order to reveal and consider alternative lexicons.
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