Author Archives: mcs2014

Jesse Jones

Jesse Jones’ 16mm film The Spectre and the Sphere evokes the spectres of ideology and amplifies residual voices that haunt the cultural vessels of history. It examines how the spaces of our popular imagining, such as the theater and the cinema, are also containers of historical and political impulses.

Joo Jae-hwan

Thus
the heaven and earth lost their colors
and the sun and the moon lost their light.

siren eun young jung

Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux depends on the unique aesthetics of tradition and performativity in pansori, a genre of traditional music in Korea. The work as a performance appropriates the content and form of Chunhyang-ga, the most well-known piece of pansori among the five songs left today. However, it reveals that the development of the typical romantic narrative is embedded with a constant struggle against the class consciousness of the period.

Mikhail Karikis

In Children of Unquiet, Karikis collaborated with the children of the remaining families living in the area around the geothermal power plant to create a film that orchestrates a children’s “take-over” of a deserted workers’ village and its adjacent industrial and natural locations.

Kim Soo-nam

While witnessing the government’s policy to eradicate shamanism, Kim Soo-nam began to capture with his camera the scenes of shamanism as traditional Korean religion and culture that was disappearing.

Kim In-whoe

Until the late 1960s, records of Korean shamanism were limited to materials by Japanese folklorists in the 1920s and 1930s and a small number of scholars in Korean Studies. A young educationalist in those days, Kim In-whoe felt the Western educational paradigm was limitedly applied to Korean society and became interested in Koreans’ traditional religious beliefs, or shamanism.

Dinh Q. L?

In Barricade, Dinh Q. L? reflects on the legacy of the Vietnamese and Algerian peoples’ struggle against French colonialism. These revolutions have universal significance: across the continents of Asia to Africa, the same liberating wave to free the colonized “natives” of racial and cultural confinement was ushered in.

Jawshing Arthur Liou

Kora is deliberately shot and edited from a first person perspective, placing the viewer on the path of a pilgrim. The thin air of the dizzying altitude is made palpable through the hand-held camera technique. Only that which is closest in view has defined edges; the mountain remains a mirage receding into the heavens.

Joanna Lombard

The work of Swedish artist Joanna Lombard plays with the imaginary border between collective and individual imagination. With childhood memories as a point of departure for her work, Lombard’s oeuvre floats in-between a world of psychological repression, psychoanalytical liberation and cinematographic catharsis.