Every Saturday, join a staff member in the gallery for a free guided tour of esea contemporary’s exhibition ‘Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang’. The tour will provide an in-depth walk through for the exhibition, and there will be opportunities for questions and discussions. Drop in, no need to book.
The tour will last approximately 45 minutes.
The gallery’s access information is available here.
Free exhibition tours are available for schools, universities and other community groups. We also offer tailored tours per request. Please email hello@eseacontemporary.org with at least two weeks’ notice to find out more about scheduling a group visit.
Please consider making a donation for free events. esea contemporary is a registered charity and your support will help us with our mission to create a more equal, diverse, and inclusive environment for our local and global audiences.
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.
