Two Korean photographers who studied in London are participating in a group exhibition at Ritter / Zamet near the Globe Theatre this month.
ABANDONED PROTOCOL
Seung Woo Back, Kate Hawkins & Eloise Fornieles, Ben Judd, Hyung-Geun ParkCurated by Charles Danby and I-MYU Projects
7 – 29 September 2007Abandoned Protocol brings together artists from Korea and the UK through a primary discourse of photography that includes video and touches upon performance. Protocol offers a standard of behaviour, setting rules that govern syntax and conventions that inform communication. The artists in Abandoned Protocol consider such codes of social exchange, turning to the periphery of cultural convention to question the social, political and economic implication of these systems. The works move through social, psychological spaces, revealing in the poetical-uncanny of the landscape social codes that disclose considerations of environment and territory – terrains that exist on the margins of inhabited spaces.
Ben Judd’s video work I Will Heal You (2007) draws on an amalgamation of religious and quasi-religious belief systems that were experienced and investigated by the artist during a recent three-month residency in Cali, Colombia. During this time, Judd created his own Movement complete with a manifesto that was contradictory at every turn, questioning the channels through which social codes are created, authenticated and come to stand as valid units of cultural currency. Also shown are a series of Judd’s stereoscopic photographs whose manufacture perpetuates primary systems of illusion within the medium of photography.
Seung Woo Back’s photographs (above), taken at Aiins World theme park in Korea, mediate between a manufactured world of miniature replica buildings and a real world of lived-in apartment blocks, recasting the scale of each so that their differences are all but indiscernible. The opposing types of buildings stand as parallels to social and economic discrepancies between Korea and the West.
Hyung-Geun Park’s photographs of uninhabited and familiar landscapes – ponds, graveyards, woodlands (below) – have an intensive level of detail that renders their ordinariness uncanny, fantastical, and sinister.
Behaviour, etiquette and hostility engender the collaborative work of Eloise Fornieles & Kate Hawkins. Their performance realised for film, Mal Gusto (2007) — a work first performed in Tel Aviv in 2006 – cuts directly to the superficiality of social events as played out through an artworld encounter. The two protagonists emerge from a crowd to encircle each other with unbroken stares creating palpable tension. As the matadorial encounter intensifies a violent standoff of unspoken conflict unfolds, and red wine spills…
Seung Woo Back lives and works in Seoul and London and graduated from Middlesex University in 2005. Hyung- Geun Park lives and works in Seoul and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2006, recent exhibitions include a solo show at New Art Gallery Walsall, 2006. Ben Judd lives and works in London, he graduated from Goldsmiths in 1997. I Will Heal You (2007) was produced during a three-month residency in Cali, Colombia at the start of 2007 organised by the Gasworks International Residency Programme. Eloise Fornieles and Kate Hawkins both graduated from the Slade in 2006 and began collaborating immediately afterwards. They both live and work in London; Mal Gusto (2007) was filmed from a performance that took place in End of the Peer, Paradise Row, London (2 August, 2007). It was originally conceived and performed as part of Goods to Declare / MFA International, Tel Aviv, Israel 2006.
A 24-page catalogue will be available with texts by Andrew Hunt, Keum-Hyun Han, Ian Jeffery and Skye Sherwin.
The exhibition has been curated by Charles Danby and I-MYU Projects (Jeongae Im and Eunbok Yu) with support from Ritter/Zamet and the Arts Council Korea. Abandoned Protocol will tour to Seoul in 2008.
RITTER/ZAMET 2 Bear Gardens London SE1 9ED T +44 (0)20 7261 9510 E info at ritterzamet dot com [Map]
Links:
- More Seung Woo Back images at Portfolio and Artnet
- Review of Aiins World Theme Park (아인스 월드) at KBS (HT to GalbiJim) and description at Tour2Korea
- More Hyung-Geun Park images at the Goldsmiths site and Fotofest