London Korean Film Festival: Lim Minouk

Working across a range of mediums, including performance, video, sculpture, installation and community-engaged public art, Lim Minouk explores the human and societal costs of modernisation, denouncing situations of displacement and alienation caused by South Korea’s economic growth and rapid urbanisation since the 1960s. As she writes, ““in my installations, performances, and videos, I aim to give the disappearing present a proper send-off while also constructing a memory of it with the hope of seeing it again in the future. These works are different from the traditional format of a documentary in that they include the intervention of staged actions. So my sense of time does not follow the common sequence of past-present-future, but rather of past-future-present.””

This programme showcases most of Lim’s video-work, which she has described as ‘performance documentary theatre’ and which echoes agitprop cinema and theatre from the 1960s and 1970s. Political and poetical, her videos document disappearing places and people. They powerfully side with those neglected and displaced, giving a personal and subjective voice to an alternative public consciousness. In New Town Ghost (2005), a young female poetry slam performer and a drummer traverse Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo district in a pickup truck just as the neighborhood is being demolished to make way for a new high-end development. The Weight of Hands (2010), commissioned by FACT and the Liverpool Biennial, follows a special tour bus that takes its passengers on a pilgrimage, visiting places where human presence is prohibited. In Wrong Question (2006), a double screen work which questions the distance between sound and image, a disillusioned taxi driver describes the sacrifices of his generation. In Portable Keeper (2009), musician Kwon Byungjun executes performances carrying a sculpture on his shoulder, wandering between old towns’ closed-down and forgotten areas. The Possibility of the Half (2012), also a double screen work – the separation between the screens not unlike the separation of the two Koreas –was inspired by images of North and South Koreans crying over the deaths of their respective leaders, which Lim dissects in all their theatricality and irony.

In addition to Minouk Lim’s work, the programme will also feature a work from the LUX collection with strong resonances with Lim’s practice: Lost Sound by John Smith and Graeme Miller, which documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London.
Part of the London Korean Film Festival 2017