thursday 12, friday 13 and saturday 14 november – 7 pm (*)
(* limIted capacity, booking requIred: info@xing.it)
P420
Geumhyung Jeong (KR)
Rehab Training
durational performance, italian première
Rehab Training. South Korean choreographer and performance artist Geumhyung Jeong always falls in love with the objects she handles and collects. Her approach follows the logic of invocation and incantation, and draws from both the puppeteer’s knowledge and actor’s technique. 그분 (Gbun) is the instance that takes a decision. It is neither personal nor common, neither subjective nor social. It comes, performs and disappears. In South Korea, alongside mass production, consumerism and technological saturation, in a society anchored in patriarchal command including sexual and role policies, ghosts, spirits and revenants are still pretty much alive. Geumhyung Jeong looks closely at this society, its often contradictory convictions and morals, its dreams and hidden desires. She slows down the speed of her being, and turns this prolonged temporality into uncanny sensuality. The performative situations she establishes are vortexes, in which the living and the non-living meet. In Rehab Training she invites the audience to witness her programme of physical training for a humanoid dummy, clinically rehabilitating ‘him’ by means of concrete tasks. A duet evolves from common gestures, gazes and manipulations. She moves oscillating between a service professional’s distance and a personal touch, between human flesh and the objectual presence of plastic and metal, between herself and the technically mediated world around her. Moving along this fine line between executor and executed, between performer and performed, she transcends the dichotomies by undermining given patterns, constantly renegotiating the relationship between the human body and the objects or machines that surround it, between subject and object, the master and the slave. Who controls who?
The first solo exhibition of Geumhyung Jeong in Italy, Upgrade in Progress, is open at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive from 6 March to 2 June 2020. On Sunday 29 March the artist will interact with the objects of her installation at the Palazzina dei Giardini with the live action Demonstration tour.
Geumhyung Jeong is a South Korea-based choreographer, visual and performance artist. She studied Acting at Hoseo University in Asan, Dance and Performance at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul and Animation Film at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. Jeong’s work explores the potential of the body, its sensuality and its power to change its surroundings, combining languages and techniques from the fields of contemporary dance, performance, puppet theatre and the visual arts. Performances: Oil Pressure Vibrator, 7 ways, Fitness Guide, CPR Practice, Rehab Training, Homemade RC Toy. Exhibitions and installations: Private Collection: Unperformed Objects, Spa & Beauty. She has exhibited works and performed internationally at Tate Modern (London), Kunsthalle Basel, Liveworks Festival (Sidney), PuSh Festival (Vancouver), Atelier Hermes (Seoul), New Museum Triennial (New York), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zurich), Delfina Foundation (London), SPIELART Festival (Munich), ImpulsTanz Festival (Wien), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Time-Based Art Festival (Portland), Kyoto Experiment, Taipei Arts Festival and many others. In 2016 was the winner of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang award, and in 2009 of the Excellence Award for Alternative Vision at the Seoul New Media Art Festival.
concept, direction, performance Geumhyung Jeong
production supported by Arts Council Korea
coproduction PACT Zollverein (Essen), Audio Visual Pavilion (Seoul)
production management partner in crime