Sung Hwan Kim
Tranzitdisplay, Prague, Czech Republic
In the headquarters of a now-liquidated First Republic agency for workers’ pension and insurance, the Prague chapter of Tranzit, a network of initiatives sponsored by the Austrian Erste Bank, has united with Display, an artist-run initiative. Since the early 1990s, the Czech pension system has been an important platform for neo-liberalism to promote rapid accommodation to western models of market economy. Appropriately staged in this fraught space of tangled histories and complicities, the most recent monographic survey of works by Sung Hwan Kim, ‘A Still Window from Two or More Places’, spans 2003 to 2007 and grants viewers the opportunity to see two of Kim’s lesser-known earlier works, It Only Bothers Me Because It’s In Me (2003) and Flat White Rough Cut (2004). As explorations of the postmodern obliteration of ontology and the visual regimes of the image-repertoire, Kim’s early work offers important insight into cultural practices being proposed under the post-democratic condition.
Beyond the monumental sculptures of four workers functioning as robust columns on the bare cement façade, a narrow set of stairs lead to a dark cellar. In a large projection flickering in the back room, a cluster of missiles caught in a broken moment stall between intermittent pauses and skips. The image recalls Kim’s captioned drawing How Thoughts Become Explosions by Induction (2009), a nebulous diagram with star-like extensions tracing object, ‘ponderer’ (the term is Kim’s) and perspective in the infinite doubling of image and story. Over the archival film footage, a voice outlines the instructions imparted by the absent director responsible for selecting the clip: ‘the film should start with a motive,’ he had told her (or so she claims).
The 30-minute video that ensues, It Only Bothers Me Because It’s In Me (2003), is Kim’s iteration of a disintegrating dialogue between what appear to be two bored lovers condemned to interminable ennui. Through elaborate enactments of mimicry and ritual, ‘he’ becomes ‘her’ and ‘she’ becomes ‘him’, in a mutual annihilation of alterity. In contrast to the archive, a stockpile of documents, impossible to know in its entirety and gathered as a symbol of power and control, the image-repertoire is a system of carefully curated individual images, ferocious in their collective persuasive and performative power. If, as Roland Barthes wrote in Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), the object of love is the image-repertoire, then Kim’s mockery of the lovers’ discourse explores the crisis of desire through a crisis of the image-repertoire. Or, to paraphrase Kim, a kind of paranoia provoked by repeated doubling at an exponential rate: an infinitely expansive mind infinitely multiplying to explosion.
In the experimental novel Dictée (1980), artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote ‘Dead Words. Dead Tongue.’ Cha’s text performed the death of the author in an autobiographical account of dislocation and the splintered subject that was pierced with the politics of post-colonialism, anti-imperialism and feminism. Kim picks up the loose threads of Cha’s fractured self to recount a final dispersion, the extreme disassociation characteristic of the post-democratic subject.
Emily Verla Bovino
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