New Town Ghost (2005) is one of Lim’s trio of large-scale video installations. (The other two are S. O. S—Adoptive Dissensus [2009] and The Weight of Hands [2010].) The series grew out of her interest in capturing lost memories and the collective unconscious in rapidly globalizing cities such as Seoul. New Town Ghost documents a young female activist who is standing aggressively on a truck, rapping slam poetry through a megaphone to the rhythm of a nearby drummer. The two performers are from the Yeongdeungpo district, which has been drastically transformed by development from an industrial zone into a “new town” full of giant department stores and mega-brands. Yeongdeungpo is symbolic of many transformations witnessed by a young generation of Koreans. For Lim it is a dystopian place where the idea of a better future is simply delusional. The poem, talking about the new malls, the skyscrapers derides not only neoliberalism but also the indifferent citizens who have apparently sold their souls to it.
Loss, grief, trauma, death, and memory are consistent themes that Minouk Lim addresses through her sculptures, installations, performances, and videos. Lim’s provocative body of work is a response to and reconciliation of traumatic historical events in Korea from the late 1940s to the present day, including the undocumented massacres that occurred during the Korean War of the late 1940s and 50s, the protest for workers rights in the 1970s during the economic expansion of South Korea, and the ever-present fear of nuclear obliteration that clouds the entire Korean peninsula. For Lim, the collective experience is personal and her research confronts forgotten pasts and unlawful persecutions and in many instances, involves direct contact and establishing meaningful relationships with victims of torture, wrongfully accused North Korean spies, and civil rights organization employees.
The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth...
Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...