Museum as Hub

Hub Notes: 2/9/08

In one of my tours today, a visitor who is a photographer-artist, made a really interesting connection between projects. We were talking about siren eun young jung’s posters The Narrow Sorrow*, which depict photos of impossibly narrow doorways (where women sex workers enter in and out buildings in Dongducheon) paired with poetic texts by the artist. Insa curator Heejin Kim describes the work on this website:

“siren eun young jung records people who actually exist but who don’t. She brings awake the memories of those women who wandered through the dark nights like apparitions or vanished over time, and records them in her work as an alternative history. In Dongducheon, some live like invisible people because they are not inscribed in official administrative records, although they do exist in actuality and live in the area. So called unregistered” and “unidentified”, the club “sisters”, the second generation of multicultural families, and people from different minority groups are outsiders who have not been pronounced. They are eligible to receive neither their status guarantee nor public benefits although they are engaged in social roles and economic labor.”

As the visitor observed, siren eun young jung’s project employs a similar approach as Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems. Both artists use text and photography to address the absence of their subjects’ representation—the urban spaces depicted signify the non-presence of the people they refer to—highlighting the exclusionary hierarchies of collective representation.

-Sabrina Locks

*The Narrow Sorrow is presented by Insa Art Space as part of the introductory Museum as Hub presentation, December 1, 2007 – February 24, 2008. More new work by siren eun young jung commissioned around the city of Dongducheon will be presented in Insa Art Space’s solo Hub presentation, opening May 4, 2008. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems is presented by the New Museum as part of the introductory Hub presentation.