2-channel video installation, 11 min. Korean.
Using videos and archive material Strange Meetings documents a former STD (sexually transmitted diseases) treatment facility on a US military encampment in South Korea. The facility, established in the 1970s, served to isolate bodies presumed contaminated from those deemed clean. A host of strange meetings, the site today, however, materially bears witness to the entangled relations behind its establishment and the impossibility of creating neat separations. The decomposing building is being encroached upon by rubbish and surrounding vegetation. Knotted together, each feeds on the other, breaking down distinctions between inside and outside, architecture and debris.
Behind the building a performance takes place each weekend, inadvertently complicating the relationship between past and present and diffusing the reading of the site by overriding but potentially also purging its history. A woman who was forcibly subjected to treatment draws a map of the facility from memory. Documents used as evidence in a recent compensation lawsuit are presented in an archive while an aluminum diabond print shows how the entangled bilateral relations become visible on a microscopic level.
Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker born in Jeju Island, South Korea and adopted to Denmark in 1980. She currently lives and works in between Jeju and Copenhagen. She holds an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is currently a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen/The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Kaisen has directed several feature-length films, including The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010), and Reiterations of Dissent (2011/16). Taken together, her works constitute a multi-faceted inquiry into the effects of colonialism, war, and militarism, often from a gendered and diasporic perspective.
