Reiterations of Dissent
Jane Jin Kaisen

Production year: 2011
5 channel video installation
Duration of each video: 8: 57 – 10.02 min.
Color 16:9 HD Pro Res HQ 1920×1080p
Language: Korean and English.
Subtitles: English

Camera: Jane Jin Kaisen, Guston Sondin-Kung
Editing: Jane Jin Kaisen
Voices: Hyun Ki Young, Kim Seong Nae, Huh Yeong Seon, Kim Kyung Hoon, Jeong Gong Chul, Kim Dong Choon, Kim Jong Min
Translation: Se Young Oh, Young Sook Han, Jeyon Kim, Jin Kyung Choi, Park Jung Joo, Lee Jung Hyo, An Hye Kyung, Sunyoung Hong, Lim Yoon Kyung.

Supported by: The Danish Arts Council

Exhibitions

Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark – ENTER II – Oct. 14 2011 – Jan. 29 2012

Århus Art Building, Denmark – Dissident Translations – Solo Exhibition, Oct. 8 2011-Jan. 8 2012.

Reiterations of Dissent is a work about the suppressed memory of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre which began on April Third, 1948 on the artists’ birth place, Jeju Island south of the Korean peninsula. Following, the newly inaugurated South Korean State, with support from the United States Military Government in Korea, committed a genocide on up to a third of the island population. The Jeju Islanders were targeted as leftists for rejecting the May 10 election for a separate South Korean Nation. For more than five decades, it was illegal to talk about the event.
Each of the five videos uncovers different aspects of how the un-reconciled trauma of Jeju 4.3 keeps resonating in the present landscape of Jeju Island, in literature, in the memory of survivors and relatives, and in shamanic rituals mediating between the living and the dead.

“Reiterations of Dissent” was awarded the ENTERPRIZE 2011 by Jury Chus Martinez, associate curator at MACBA, Barcelona and co-curator of DOCUMENTA 13; Dirk Luckow, director of Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Åsa Nacking, director of Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden.

The jury’s statement:
“The price goes to Jane Jin Kaisen. It is very difficult today to address the subject of collapse and recovery and in doing so finding a new language for experiencing the images, not only thinking through them. And we thought this artist has been able to create a powerful combination of registers that explore, on the one hand, the very genre of the documentary, and of the other our relationship with text, image and action. Every monitor seems to show a different version, a different possibility to address, to tell, to invent even a relationship with an „unsable“ (in the words of Theodor Adorno) episode of Modern History, the massacre of Jeju Island in Korea. And therefore the price, to continue her research and the inquiry into the human, which she has started here