Berlin Art Prize 22: ELBOW ROOM - a solo show by Hana Yoo, including a new video installation with a film Bare Life.
Exhibition duration: SA 3.9 - FR 14.10
Opening: DO 1.9, 18H-21H
Opening hours: FRI -SUN, 15H - 19H
In her solo show, Hana Yoo (Busan, South Korea, 1987) questions the complex power system of hierarchical positions through storytelling. The exhibition Elbow Room establishes itself as a provocation through two video works: What defines our identity and how is it being manipulated?
Bare Life (2021), a loosely structured narrative film, introduces “the place” through a vague description of a prison and a first hand experience of an escape story. The artist intercuts the anonymous testimony with non sequential archival footage – amateur videos of air gun demonstrations, and technical videos of testing labs using AI technology to detect pain in rats. The obscure pairing between the rat and the refugee demonstrates an ironic but critical tone which examines their possible connection nevertheless set in different reality spheres. Comparatively, Your freedom song (2022) is a satirical representation of a popular Korean youtuber following her role as a patriotic figure of South Korean political values. As an escapee of “the place”, the online star triggers a sense of tension while setting side to side the military and strategic capacities of both countries.
The show is a continuous loop of anxiety and discomfort, where both realities are complemented and differing simultaneously: a double sided representation of the present context in South Korea.
Hana Yoo - is interested in investigating the collective anxiety and transcendental experiences formulated from the natural-artificial process of reversing perspective. Working in film and multimedia installation, she engages with the allegory of nature and technological appropriation in the context of human-environment transformation and reconstructs them through storytelling. She studied Media Arts at the Berlin University of Arts and her previous awards include film/video work grants from the Berlin Senate, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, research grants from the Stiftung Kulturwerk, Kunstfonds Bonn, and Arts Council Korea. Her works also have been shown at museums and festivals, including the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), European Media Art Festival (2020), and Busan International Video Art Festival (2020), among others.
BERLIN ART PRIZE 2022:
8 artists & 8 project spaces!
How's the art? The Berlin Art Prize is back. After two years of pandemic hiatus, this experimental, solidarity-based, independent award is once again showing the public: what does Berlin's current art have to say?
The concept of the Berlin Art Prize is simple, yet rare: All artists living in Berlin can apply. A jury of five selects the nominees according to a largely anonymous process. The nine nominated artists will each be invited to host a solo exhibition in one of nine project spaces, making the Berlin Art Prize 2022 once again a major collaborative project.
JURY:
Candice Breitz (Künstlerin)
Anna Ehrenstein (Künstlerin)
Alya Sebti (Kuratorin)
Sinthujan Varatharajah (Forscher:in)
Amelie von Wulffen (Künstlerin)
