Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts presents a solo exhibition by South Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun. Titled Songs without Lyrics, this show presents a series of in-situ, photographic, video and performance works.
Chun is known for his experimental portraits that are based on temporally set processes. Creating un-familiar situations that can provoke modes of interdependence, he provides a space for people to enter and deliberate on the meaning of the most ordinary actions. Relationships form the core of his practice and much of his work is based on situations and encounters that revolve around concepts of empathy, care and compassion.
Songs without Lyrics expands our capacities for listening to sounds that are unknown, creating alternatives for lyrics with no notes.
The show departs from collaborative engagements with the Ektaal Children’s Choir where the singers become the main actors in a series of interventions. In a photographic performance, children are asked to sing to nature. The image that is recorded, is a residue of saturated monotones and the memory of the communion between each child and tree.
The choir is also invited to interpret music to picture scores by Koreans with hearing and speaking disabilities. Acting like conductors, they create melodies to each piece, performing for the original composers of these scores. The imagined tunes thus generate new nodes of how we relate to each other.
Also present in the show are participatory photographs and videos that tap in to our innermost sensibilities through interrogations of the physical and conceptual interplay of time.
The ephemeral settings and the conditions in each work that are prescribed become the catalysts and witnesses for something to take place between people who are brought together. In this space relationships can emerge, communication takes place, vulnerabilities can breathe. The portrait, performance, video become time capsules. Chun invites us to watch, listen, experience the rhythmic circulation of time.
Exhibition Preview: at Sunaparanta on Friday, 18 August 2023, 7.00 pm onwards.
The exhibition will remain open to the public until 11 November 2023
For more information email: info@sgcfa.org or call us: + 91 93706 75100 and + 91 97678 64206
Kyungwoo Chun (1969, Seoul) has for many years been working on photography projects and initiating performances in which the audience is actively involved. He attained international recognition through his portraits, many of which have a characteristic blurriness in their movements – the consequence of extended exposure times. As diverse as the artistic approaches seem at a first glance, Chun considers both performances and photographs to be in equal measure “visible manifestations of that which is not visible.”
Chun has realised numerous performances with participation of the public in many cities including Barcelona, Seoul, Berlin, Liverpool, Zurich, Mumbai, Bremen and New York. His work is represented in major museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); Huis Marseille stichting voor fotografie, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Emden; Museet for Fotokunst Odens; Musée Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine; The Museum of Photography Seoul; National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea (MMCA), among others.