esea contemporary is pleased to co-present an off-site screening with Modal Gallery, School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The screening will take place at SODA's Cinema Space, showcasing artist Jane Jin Kaisen's 2019 film Community of Parting (72'13") from 11 January to 25 January 2024. Visitors will have the opportunity to view the film in a continuous loop, starting every 1.5 hours on Monday to Friday, between 12 pm to 5 pm*. Free entry.
On 18 January, join the artist in the Cinema Space for a screening followed by a conversation with the artist and Xiaowen Zhu, the Director of esea contemporary, moderated by Valentino Catricalà, curator of Modal Gallery. Free admission, booking essential.
*Please note that the SODA Cinema will be closed to the public on 19 Jan, 10am – 2pm, 22 Jan afternoon, 23 Jan, 3 – 6.30pm and 24 Jan, 12 – 2pm. During these times, the film will be shown in a screening box by the SODA reception.
Community of Parting (2019) traces a different approach to borders, translation, and aesthetic mediation by invoking the ancient shamanic myth of the Abandoned Princess Bari and engaging female Korean shamanism as an ethics and aesthetics of memory and mutual recognition across time and space.
Rooted in oral storytelling and embodied by female shamans, the myth about Bari and her abandonment at birth for being born a girl has been mainly understood as a story of filial piety. However, Kaisen frames the myth as an initial story of gender transgression that transcends division logics but has the experience of othering and loss at its core. According to the myth, Bari regains the community’s acceptance after reviving the dead and is offered half the Kingdom. Yet, the heroine refuses to abide by human borders and chooses instead to become the goddess who mediates at the threshold of the living and the dead.
Community of Parting derives from Kaisen’s extensive research into Korean shamanism since 2011 and her long-term engagement with communities effected by war and division. The piece is composed of imagery filmed in locations such as Jeju Island, the DMZ, South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, the United States, and Germany. Combining shamanic ritual performances, nature -and cityscapes, archival material, aerial imagery, poetry, voiceover, and soundscapes, the piece is configured as a multi-scalar, non-linear, and layered montage loosely framed around Bari’s multiple deaths.
Both inter-subjective and deeply personal, Kaisen treats the myth of the abandoned as a gendered tale of migration, marginalization, and resilience told from a multi-vocal site. In the shamanic ritual the shaman abandons herself to mediate and gathers an assembly of the living, the dead, and multiple spirits witnesses. In a similar vein, a Community of Parting is formed in the piece around the shared sentiment of the abandoned: Ritual performances and chants by shaman Koh Sunahn, a survivor of the 1948 Jeju Massacre in South Korea constitutes a recurring rhythm and culminates in a ritual for the dead that involves the artist. The myth is also reflected in the poetry of Swedish poet Mara Lee and in the poetics of Kim Hyesoon from whose book ‘Woman, I Do Poetry’ the translated title Community of Parting derives. It further resonates in various narratives by South Korean, North Korean, and diasporic women who negotiate how gender bias along with colonialism, modernity, and war have resulted in radical ruptures while unfinished histories continue to linger.
Infused by the living, the dead, and those yet to come, Community of Parting is actualized through a process of dissolution, revival, and becoming. Informed by shamanic practice, properties integral to the filmic medium are employed to contest and diffuse spatiotemporal boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge and being. Doing so, Community of Parting proposes other ways of thinking and being with others, including the relationship to nature and other life-forms.
This screening is part of the public programme of 'Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang'. Further information is available on our Exhibition page.
Jane Jin Kaisen (born 1980 in Jeju Island, lives in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Through multi-year projects and collaborations, she has engaged topics such as transnational adoption, the Korean War and division, the Jeju April Third Massacre, and Cold War legacies. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, feminist re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Working from the thresholds of mediums and forms, disciplines and sensibilities, her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, thus contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Kaisen is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Kaisen has participated in the biennials of Liverpool, Gwangju, Anren, Jeju, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Jane Jin Kaisen: Braiding and Mending’ at The Image Centre (2023), ‘Of Specters or Returns’ at Le Bicolore (2023), ‘Currents’ at Fotografisk Center (2023), ‘Parallax Conjunctures’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021), ‘Community of Parting’ at Art Sonje Center (2021) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2020). Other recent exhibitions and screenings include: ‘Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen’, Tate Modern (2023), ‘Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World)’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022), ‘Checkpoint: Border Views from Korea’, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), ‘Unmoored Adrift Ashore’, Or Gallery Vancouver (2022).
She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Other exhibition and screening venues include: Kunsthal Århus, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, The National Museum of Photography (DK), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlinale, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Times Art Center, Museum Ludwig, Videonale (DE), Asian Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Gana Art New York, DePaul Art Museum (USA), ARKO Art Center, Seoul Museum of Art, Incheon Art Platform, Seoul New Media Art Festival, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Asia Culture Center, Coreana Museum of Art, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (KR), Silencio Club, Palais de Tokyo, Foundation Fiminco (FR), Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö Konsthall, Inter Arts Center, Kalmar Art Museum (SE), Sørlandet Art Museum and Oslo Kunstforening (NO), Finnish Museum of Photography (FN), ParaSite (HK), Kyoto Arts Center, Kyoto Museum of Art, Fukuoka Museum of Art, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, (JP), Times Museum Guangzhou, Beijing 798 Art Zone (CN), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival (TW), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (PH), The National Gallery (Indonesia), and Townhouse Gallery (EG).
esea contemporary presents Jane Jin Kaisen's first UK solo show ‘Halmang’, featuring polyphonic moving-image works, archive and reference materials. By weaving together oceanic cosmology and gendered histories, the exhibition is an in-depth inquiry into narratives of subjective and collective loss, resilience, and the formation of alternative communities.
