For the past seven years, artist Bongsu Park has explored the world of dreams through performance, immersive installations, audience participation, video, and painting, sharing the unique dream culture of Korea. In collaboration with the Tavistock Institute, Park has delved into the personal and societal significance of dreams, fostering an intimate dialogue with her audience.
With MIRROR, Park shifts her focus from dreams to memory, using this performance as the starting point of a new exploration. Through a sensory-rich performance that invites deep reflection, MIRROR intertwines personal history and collective experiences, allowing audiences to reflect on their own memories while engaging with the memories of others.
This performance draws on sensory experiences—scent, sound, and tactile stimuli—to evoke emotional responses. Through these sensory triggers, MIRROR guides the audience into a space where forgotten or fragmented memories can resurface, inviting them to reconnect with their own past. Park contrasts individual memories with shared cultural experiences, creating a dialogue between the personal and the communal.
For this performance, Park collaborates with three artists. Yidan Kim contributes her expertise in olfactory materials, using scent to deepen the sensory exploration of memory. Kristin Winters, a renowned actor and theatre maker, adds a dramatic narrative layer, embodying the emotional resonance of memory through performance. Haedong Lee, a sound artist, constructs a ‘Sound Ecosystem,’ weaving together electronic instruments and sound objects to create a sonic landscape that evokes the passage of time and the complexity of human history.
Through this multi-disciplinary collaboration, MIRROR offers a powerful insight into how memories shape our sense of self. By engaging the audience through multiple sensory stimuli, the performance becomes a space for reflection, reconnection and transformation.
Director: Bongsu Park
Bongsu Park creates multidisciplinary works that explore the intersection of personal and collective experience, melding performance, installation, video, sculpture and painting. Her work aims to connect inner thoughts and emotions with broader cultural narratives, often inviting audience participation to create an intimate exchange. Bongsu has developed an ongoing practice exploring Korean dream culture since 2017, including Dream Ritual at The Coronet Theatre in London (2019), Dreamers’ Gathering and Dream Auction at Post Territory Ujeongguk in Seoul (2021), and Social Matters through Dream Sharing with The Tavistock Institute in London (2021). Through these performances, she bridges traditional practices with contemporary issues, fostering a deeper engagement with memory, identity, and shared human experience.
Olfactory Artist: Yidan Kim
Yidan Kim uses olfactory materials and sensations to create both intangible and tangible sensory imagery. She focuses on the sense of smell which has been undervalued in the hierarchy of senses, exploring humans as sensory beings. She aims to provoke the expansion of sensory perception and cognition by emphasizing the sense of smell. She delves into the boundaries between human and non-human beings, or endeavours to shift the human-centric perspective to that of non-human entities, thereby focusing on non-material objects that exist beyond the realm of human perception. Yidan Kim studied ‘Hyang-do’ (Korean), a traditional fragrance culture in East Asia, and researched olfactory cultures and olfactory object-mediators worldwide, collecting olfactory materials. Drawing on incense-making techniques and fragrance oil perfumery, she manifests olfactory imagery synesthetically through sculpture, installations and performances.
Performer: Kristin Winters
Kristin Winters is a critically acclaimed, award-winning actor and theatre maker. Originally Croatian-American, she grew up in London where she is now based. As a performer, Kristin is best known for her role as Grace in ‘Lovefool’ – an award winning solo show originally produced by the Théâtre National du Luxembourg. She most recently featured as Dinarzade in ‘Scheherezade, A Tale’ – a new recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet with narration, and leads in the recently premiered Bosnian feature film ‘Djeda Mraz u Bosni’ (When Santa was a Communist). Kristin founded the company Bound By Theatre in 2019. As creator and performer her first piece, ‘Ghislaine/Gabler’ won Best International Play at the United Solo Awards in NYC in 2022, and more recently her ‘Saint Hildegard’ was Offie Nominated after a Work in Progress sharing at VAULT Festival 2023. She is also a founding member of NYC based company Invulnerable Nothings.
Sound Artist: Haedong Lee
Haedong Lee stimulates audiences emotionally and intellectually by constructing a distinctive sound ecosystem with sound objects he creates and electronic instruments. He has been examining the contexts in which sound has been used in the history of civilisation, with the view that sound has played a crucial role in humans becoming the top predator leading to the Anthropocene. His recent development of ‘The Sound of Restriction’ series mainly draws its inspiration from cowbells – the sound shackles relegating animals to livestock. He has studied shamanism, folk beliefs, rituals, ceremonies and labour songs from various tribes and cultures in West Africa, Asia and Europe. He has been exploring answers to the origins of sound through collecting and structuring sound materials. He has been also making sound objects using metal, wood and various other by-products of the Anthropocene, and has been actively engaged in interdisciplinary works such as sound performance, record and installation.