Hold your breath for four minutes--The Cemetery
Single-channel video with sound still, 4 min. Courtesy the artist
Hold your breath for four minutes--The Cemetery
Artist: Sangdon Kim
Hold your breath for four minutes—The Cemetery, 2008
Single-channel video with sound, 4 min
Courtesy the artist
Sangpae-dong Public Cemetery has served as a burial site for more than 1,000 unidentified deceased since the colonial era. These “unidentified” deceased belonged to many different kinds of drifting minority groups in the history of Dongducheon that have emerged and vanished by the change in their political situation. They include sex workers, smugglers, gangsters, and drug dealers, illegitimate children of U.S. soldiers, migrant laborers and simply underprivileged Koreans. A delicately edited sequence of natural images accompanied by sound the artist captured from the site, the video piece exudes a narrative line knit by formal association, structural logic and semiotic links. The underlying tone of the narrative is keen, subdued, blackly humorous, and thought provoking, which leads viewers to question who is being silenced by whom today. Just because people are deceased, do they become silent? Aren’t the dead more active in articulating their beings than most of dormant beings in death-in-life?
-Heejin Kim, Insa Art Space
This video is part of Insa Art Space’s presentation “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision,” May 9-July 6, 2008, Museum as Hub, New Museum.
