The Global

Archive

Hanm

i Gallery 17th Interim

Exhibition

17th Interim Exhibition24th January-9th February 2013Curated by: Marquard Smith,Emma Brasó and Nina Trivedi

Tom Corby

Shazed Dawood

Young-In Hong

susan pui san lok

Hanmi Gallery is pleased to announce the 17th interim exhibition ‘The Global Archive’ by four international ar tists whose work puts the question of the archive at the hear t of con-temporary visual ar ts practice. They do this because the archive is a means by which we de-lineate the past after the fact. It is how we define the present as it unfolds. It is how we conceive our fictions of the future. Inevitably, the future itself vibrates here also, inter-rupting the present, but doing so only to demand that we concede it is unknown to us.

The archive for these ar tists, then, it is a repository, an inventory, a source, and a re-source. It is a place of authority and power, a site for the storage, generation, trans-mission, and distribution of knowledge. It is a provocation also, for as we look to pro-duce and animate it anew, we figure out that it precedes and arranges us also.

Why the global archive? For these ar tists the archive as it travels in time and space is an organising principle of global dimensions. As an arrangement, it is a network that is worldwide and planetary. As an ecology, it is a circulating of carefully decided upon knowledges, information and data, images and ideas and gestures. Each decision is a drop in a body of water that comprises the archive, and that floods it, sweeps through it, a flowing effected by mass, tension, velocities, trajectories, and scatterings. As a condition of our time, the global archive as a communicative medium of exchange shapes, and is shaped by, the routes these ar tists carve through it. Their decisions are our diagram.

Shezad Dawood’s

work links the communities and locations of varying cul-tures, as well as linking histories and fictions. Utilising ar t-house and low-budget filmmaking to restage and reimagine events and scenes appropriated from a variety of these av-enues, Dawood questions the performative process of im-age making. Science fiction and the occult provide a par-ticular reference point, as Dawood maps cross-cultural influences, and engages with contemporary social issues and notions of appropriation and a global anthropology.

The feature length Trailer, for example, sees Dawood take on structuralist film, and modern science fiction, in order to progress his discussion of race and migration. Piercing Brightness, a later fully realized science fiction film chronicles the story of a young Chinese couple who arrive on Ear th to retrieve members of their alien race. These members had been sent to Ear th generations ago to study and ob-serve, but over time had become corrupted, and lost ties with their original purpose and ideals. Again, issues of mi-gration and cultural exchanges are heavily implied, and re-main personal to Dawood and his varied cultural heritage.

Shezad Dawood was trained at Central Saint Mar tins, and the Royal College of Ar t, London, and holds PhD from Leeds Metropolitan University. He was a winner of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Ar t Prize, and his work has been exhibited interna-tionally, including as par t of ‘Altermodern’, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, at Tate Britain, and the 53rd Venice Biennale (both 2009), and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2010). Dawood’s fur-ther extensive exhibitions include interventions in cities such as Tangiers, Mumbai, Karachi, Hamburg, and Singapore. Solo exhibitions have been held at Modern Ar t Oxford, 2012, and Parasol Unit, 2013. He is also a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster.

completed her PhD at Goldsmiths in 2011. She has developed a number of site-specific projects including Double Encounter at i-myu Projects, London and The Performing City in Aicho, Ja-pan. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Ar t and Design, New York, Rokeby Gallery, London, and A Foundation Liverpool. She lives and works between London and Seoul.

Young-In Hong

is an ar tist and writer interested in issues of climate, technol-ogy and systems. His interdisciplinary works have been pre-sented at the Institute of Contemporary Ar ts and the Victoria and Alber t Museum, as well as internationally at the Japan Media Ar t Festival or the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientech-nologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. He lives and works in London.

Tom Corby

predominantly seeks to explore possibilities for a critical aesthetics and poetics of place, and questions of nostalgia, aspiration, cultivation, and translation, in diaspora. Working across installa-tion, moving image, sound, performance and text, Lok examines these inherent human traits and develops moving image dialogues. These journeys often place her in collaboration with dancers, choreographers, composers, and archivists. Even athletes were featured in Lightness, which fol-lows a pole-vaulting woman training for competition. Aspiration, competition, professionalism versus amateurism, and human endeavor are all clearly explored, and Lok seems to enlighten our understanding of these often merely accepted or expected traits and trends in modern human behavior, and perhaps hold us accountable for these progressions. The works are there-fore evidently experimental, research-driven and highly interdisciplinary, as well as collaborative.

Susan Pui San Lok

Many of these ideas are pushed forward, alongside themes of nostalgia and the archival in Faster, Higher. This five-screen work pulls together montages from the Olympic archive and rare Chi-nese documentaries that suggest cultural rhetoric, discuss the global branding of the Olympics, and resonances between notions of nation and spor t, patriotism and physical endeavour. The rather strange rituals and symbols present throughout the games and its ceremonies, as well as those of individual nations are highlighted and explored, and Lok again holds entire generations accountable for their seemingly normal, but technically abstract, acts and rituals. Susan Pui San Lok holds a BA in Fine Ar t and an MA in Feminism & the Visual Ar ts from the University of Leeds, as well as a PhD in Fine Ar t from the University of East London.

Susan Pui San Lok

Marquard Smith curates, writes, programmes, commissions, and edits. He is Director of the In-stitute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture. Emma Brasó was curatorial fellow at CCA Glasgow in 2012. She is a curator and ar t historian conducting a PhD on pseudonymity at University of Westminster. Nina Trivedi is currently a doctoral researcher at University of Westminster. She has a MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College and has had recent curatorial projects in London and Berlin.

Curators

In collaboration with

London

30 Maple StreetLondonW1T 6HAUnited KingdomT +44(0)208 286 4426F +44(0)208 286 8976info@hanmigallery.co.uk

Seoul

20Tower, 162-11, Samsung-dongGangnam-gu, SeoulKoreaT +82 (0)70 7733 3883F +82 (0)2 539 8894