kimura byol-nathalie lemoine
kate-hers RHEE
Leah Nichols
Curated by
Amy Mihyang Ginther
For decades, Korean artists and activists who were adopted overseas have grappled with the idea of ambiguous loss through their work. They simultaneously construct and grieve their separation from family members, cultural belonging, and racial identity while navigating societies that expect them to be grateful for these experiences. These artists have used performance, visual arts, and other creative mediums to reclaim agency of their stories, seeking forms of sustainable self/community-love that transcend narratives that obscure trauma, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. [dis]locations: Traversing solidarities within Korean adopted activisms illuminates how these explorations have evolved to further deepen solidarities with other historically marginalized and displaced communities as we continue to seek justice and reconciliation together.
This exhibition seeks to explore Eleana J. Kim’s assertion that adopted Korean identity is “continually performed, negotiated, and contested.” The action of traversing evokes multiple experiences of this negotiation: over and through, back and forth, sideways, in opposition to, through examination, or even through denial. These seemingly contradictory movements amplify these artists’ explorations of their activisms and personhoods, honoring their shifts through time, location, bodies, and mediums to destabilize identities confined through essentialist notions of nation, time, and family. These works compel the audience to sit with the absence of a simple process and to [dis]locate themselves from their comfort, while providing ways to navigate forms of ambiguous loss by inviting possibilities of these collective/individual struggles within.
mihee-nathalie lemoine, né.e kimura byol, is a belgian-canadian multimedia artist based in Montreal that produces conceptual work, digital prints and videos. poetry and calligraphy are also part of zer body of work. kimura*lemoine talks about multi identities such as diaspora, displacement, gender. zer work has been shown at museums, galleries, and cinematheques in canada, the united states, belgium, france, and south korea, including kimura*lemoine doesn’t like to use capital letters.
Pronouns: Ze/Zer
Accordingly, in the film, #6261 (2018), kimura - lemoine overlays photographs of zer childhood self with seemingly unrelated anecdotes about diaspora, family, and belonging as a way to encourage those experiencing this work to make intuitive and meaningful connections between them.
With: So Hee, Voice: Brigitte Creplet, Text/Editing/Sound: Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine, Music: Le plat pays/J. Brel, Putain Putain/TC Matic, Souvenir de Chine/Jean-Michel Jarre, Wonderful World/L. Armstrong
With the support of Centre Multimedia de la Communauté française de Belgique
Distribution: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir
Script: A Korean adoptee writes a letter to her birth mother. She describes her feelings in her adoptive society.
With: So-Hee, Camera: Cho Mihee, Editing : Kimpo Kim, Sound: Sandy Pinteus, Sound Mixed: Isabelle Lussier, (avec le soutien de l’ACIC à la Post-Production)
Script: Zin (filmmaker) et Zinneke (actress) are two Belgian Korean-adoptees. In 1988, they made a short film ‘Adoption’. Since then, the actress stayed her whole life in Belgium, and the filmmaker left Belgium to live in Korea. 30 years after the film Adoption, Zin brings back Zinneke to their birthland, for the first time. Reflections on abandon, motherhood, roots and the right to know.
Camera: Antonio Pierre Almeida, Editing: Aube Foglia, Sound design: Mélanie Gauthier, Sandy Pinteus
(Conseil des Arts de Montréal, SODEC, ONF)
Script: This short documentary proposes an artistic vision of the city of Montreal at the intersection of the hybrid identities of the people who live there. The sense of belonging among eleven Montreal residents who share their local or international immigration experience, is enriched by their understanding of elsewhere, others and globalization.
Leah Nichols is an award-winning filmmaker and designer based in San Francisco. She is best known for the animated short film, 73 Questions (2018 San Francisco International Film Festival selection, 2018 Social Impact Media Awards winner). She served as the lead animator for the documentaries Tomorrow Will Be a Better Day For Me (2020 BBC News) and Only the Moon/Solamente La Luna (2019 Sundance Ignite winner). Her work seeks to celebrate connections across differences, expand media representations of family structures, and eliminate stigmas related to mental health.
Pronouns: She/Her
Leah Nichols uses illustration, documentary film, collage, and animation to assert a joyful sense of agency over past/present stories. Sometimes mixing various mediums in the same work, she encourages multiple perspectives to exist simultaneously, re-imagining what justice looks like for communities impacted by colonialism, capitalism, racism, and misogyny. Nichols’ ability to capture socio-politicized meaning through seemingly mundane moments challenges restrictive narratives around international adoption and family reunion.
digital animation + live action footage
Pronouns: She/Her/They
kate-hers RHEE evokes otherness, disorientation, and discomfort through participatory performance art, installation, video, and other interdisciplinary mediums. She often focuses on the body as a site — both personal and political — through material engagement with her own body, and with objects that powerfully highlight its absence or manipulation: shoes, visors, or hair. RHEE’s inclusion of signatures, fingerprints, and small ID photos on the bureaucratic documents in Allegiance, Fidelity and the Boundaries of Belonging (2020) demonstrate ways the body is reduced to only what is needed by the state to prove eligibility for citizenship. She combines these provocations with powerful symbols of European, US, and Korean histories and mythologies, [re]imagining ways that bodies are impacted by patriarchal objectification, colonization, and other forms of systemic trauma.
Congratulations!, 2018
Allegiance, Fidelity and the Boundaries of Belonging, 2020
single channel video, HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 4:22
Allegiance, Fidelity and the Boundaries of Belonging builds on the 2018 installation work Crossing the Line, that displayed the paper trail of quiet violence of forced migration and detailed RHEE’s shifting identity. The immigration process of her American adoption and naturalization to become a US citizen and the painful emotional and bureaucratic journey she undertook in 2017 to reclaim her legal original South Korean identity is represented in official looking documents and certifications. Both works evoke larger global and historical issues surrounding identity records and archives, while underscoring how the power of documents control, hinder and grant mobility. While the artist was fighting to recover her lost South Korean nationality, not only were transnational adopted adults in the United States getting deported back to their birth countries for lack of legal status, but also thousands of refugees and migrants were risking their lives to seek a better place in the West.
Dual Nationality Holder Tongue Twister, 2018,
single channel video, HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 10:37
Special thanks to Bryan Jackson and Deyo Forteza for camerawork and cinematography.
Dual Nationality Holder Tongue Twister is a video performance where the artist incessantly and earnestly repeats in the Korean language "dual nationality holder" faster and faster until she cannot say it accurately anymore. These words sounded strange to her and were difficult to speak, similar to a tongue twister. Her stark concentration is evident as she attempts to perfectly enunciate the words. RHEE fluctuates in the piece being at times pensive and then embarrassed, as she stumbles, misarticulates and slips up in her "native language”.
Curator
Amy Mihyang Ginther
CW: adopted person death, Black death, mental health, family separation, car accident
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