London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Film Screenings and an artist talk linked to the current KCC exhibition

Supporting the current exhibition Measuring Inventing Temperature at the KCC, there will be two imaginative film screenings this month. The second of the screenings will be preceded by an artist talk with the Cambridge philosopher, Hasok Chang, who inspired the exhibition.

Note that the screenings start at 7:30 rather than the more usual 7:00.

Special Film Screenings in July

Measuring

As part of the Korean Cultural Centre UK’s summer exhibition Measuring Inventing Temperature, we are presenting a series of film and video works from an international group of artists. Across two screenings, these films compliment the exhibition by asking questions of science and the premises upon which it is based. With a compilation of shorts on 17 July 2014 and a feature film on 31 July 2014, the films included in this programme interrogate the modes of scientific understanding implicit in the exhibition Measuring Inventing Temperature by taking the viewer on a temporal journey from questioning to interpretation to invention.

Both screenings will take place in the Korean Cultural Centre UK.
Admission is free of charge, but booking is essential. To reserve your place, please email: [email protected] with the subject line RSVP Inventing Temperature Film.

Prior to the screening on 31 July, there will be an Artist Talk starting at 6pm. Participating artists will discuss the exhibition with Prof. Hasok Chang.

Screening 1: Thursday 17 July 7:30pm

(Programme Duration: 82mins)

Do you think science…? (Semiconductor, 2006, SD video, 12mins)
Encyclopedia Britannica (John Latham, 1971, 16mm, 6mins)
All the Time in the World (Semiconductor, 2005, SD video, 5mins)
Tree (Chris Welsby, 1974, 16mm, 4mins)
Windmill III (Chris Welsby, 1974, 16mm, 10mins)
Photographic Survey (Byun jae-kyu, 2013, HD video, 15mins 48secs)
They Unduloping (Edmund Cook, 2014, HD video, 6mins 30secs)
Tae-mong (Goh Sung Hoon, 2012, HD video, 22mins)

Windmill III (Chris Welsby, 1974)
Windmill III (Chris Welsby, 1974) (Image source)

Screening 1 opens with Do you think science…? (2006) by Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), in which the viewer witnesses physicists grappling with a question that requires them to think intuitively about the nature of their work. The question while not apparent to the viewer reveals the presence of belief and intuition at the heart of the scientific project. John Latham’s Encyclopedia Britannica (1971) performs a silent interrogation on the Encyclopedia Britannica, page-by-page one frame at a time, rendering the wealth of human knowledge contained therein abstract and unintelligible. Returning to Semiconductor, with All the Time in the World (2005), we ‘observe’ the changing shape of the Northumbrian landscape over millions of years. Employing sound waves of seismic data to reanimate photographic images of this epic landscape, the film offers a way to visually and aurally feel the data. In the following two works, Chris Welsby reflects upon the act of filming as an observational process. In Tree (1974) the world is seen from the constantly shifting point(s) of view of a tree as its branches sway in the wind. Similarly, in Windmill III (1974) observation is dependent on the strength and direction of the wind and is constantly interrupted by the rotating sails and an attached mirror; thus Windmill III reveals what is normally unseen – the camera itself as well as the scene behind the camera. Byun Jae-kyu’s Photographic Survey (2013) considers how visible and invisible memories play out within a filmed scene. For Byun, the attempt to depict and distill memory through film paradoxically leads to its ‘dispersal and disappearance’. In They Unduloping (2014), Edmund Cook suggests an alternative convention for knowledge production in understanding the relationship between language and the physical world, and perhaps a perspective yet-to-come. The final work in this screening Tae-mong (2012) explores the Korean tradition of dreams that predicts the birth of a child. Goh Sunghoon uses the documentary form – relating to its quest for ‘truth’ – and observes these dream stories to ask where is the ‘truth’ to be found – in dreams, beliefs and superstitions, or in the empirical claims of science. And, how might these apparently different perspectives be bound up together, driven by the same desire to make sense of the world around us.

Screening 2: Thursday 31 July 7:30pm

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004, 125mins)

Tropical Malady

Screening 2 presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s full-length film Tropical Malady (2004) – a fantastical romance drama which centers on a soldier investigating the slaying of cattle at local farms in rural Thailand. The film is in two segments – the first a story of romance between the film’s two protagonists, the second a tale about a soldier lost in the jungle, haunted by the spirit of a shaman. What appears initially as a conventional film narrative gives way to a film told twice – firstly through an observational lens and then as a kind of vivid mythic tableau. Weerasethakul’s poetic polemic serves to represent what all of the works in this film programme examine – that the visible as empirically observed no longer guarantees a form of absolute knowledge.

Links:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.