ALLORA & CALZADILLA Half Mast, Full Mast, 2010 2 Channel HD video projection, color, 21'11" Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery, London Photo by Ken ADLARD © ALLORA & CALZADILLA Reenacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures 22 September 2017 – 21 January 2018 MMCA Gwacheon The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director: Bartomeu Mari) presents the exhibition Reenacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures from Friday, September 22, 2017, to Sunday, January 21, 2018, in the Circular Gallery 1 at MMCA, Gwacheon. Featuring thirty-eight artists and collectives working in and outside of Korea, Reenacting History is a large-scale international special exhibition that focuses on how the body and gestures have revealed the current social and cultural contexts and interests as an artistic medium since the 1960s until today. The body is a medium through which “I” build a relationship with others and encounter different situations in the world, as well as a social space in which the politics of reality such as power, capital, and knowledge are at work. As such, the body has been a major existence throughout the entire scope of human life, and numerous artists have employed the body as an artistic medium since the 1960s. Based on various ways in which bodily gestures, as an artistic medium, approach and artistically react to our life stories, the exhibition is divided into three parts. Part 1, titled Performing Collective Memory and Culture, illuminates performance works, which have attempted to reenact history by restructuring through gestures the collective memories and cultural heritage of a community. This part will also focus on the collective actions by Korean performance artists and Japanese avant-garde art groups of the 1960s and 1970s to shed light on the ways in which the artists reacted and resisted through gestures towards the specific social and political situations of their contemporary times. Part 2, Everyday Gestures, Social Choreography, takes the perspective of “social choreography” to cast light on performance works after the 1960s, which brought everyday gestures into the context of art to highlight issues of reality and life. Part 3, Performing Community, introduces works that use the body to reenact the social issues of our communities that arose after the late 1990s. This section will present collective performances that explore and experiment with “temporary communities” through collaboration and communication with community members and intimate encounters of bodies. The “reenactment” of history attempted by the participating artists in this exhibition is different from recording history through language, which explicitly aims to recreate or prove a history. The bodily gestures force the history written in language to be reexamined. In Reenacting History, the artists, through their gestures, document the history of trauma and absence, which the history written in language failed to or could not afford to write. This exhibition will be an opportunity to discover the possibility that writing history through the bodily gestures of artists could become an “alternative, resistant way of transcribing history.” A variety of cultural programs including a series of lectures and symposiums will be held to help visitors better understand the exhibition. A lecture-performance titled 1960’s Japanese Avant-garde Art and Performance Screening×Agitation is scheduled for Saturday, September 23, 2017. The performance will feature Kato Yoshihiro, the leader of Zero Jigen, and KuroDalaiJee, an expert on Japanese avant-garde art of the 1960s, from Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. On Saturday, November 4, 2017, a symposium on the exhibition Reenacting History will be held in collaboration with the Korean Society of Aesthetics and Science of Art, illuminating the social meaning of performance from an academic perspective. Details about the events are available on the MMCA website (www.mmca.go.kr). ※ For general enquiries, please call +82-2-3701-9500 (Seoul Branch, MMCA) ※ For more information on the exhibition, please contact Exhibition Department 1 of MMCA at +82-2-2188-6241 ※ Please check the link below for images and further information: http://webhard.mmca.go.kr id : mmcapr1 / pw : 0987 (guest > 2017 > MMCA 2017 Exhibition) Exhibition Introduction & Artworks 1. Performing Collective Memory and Culture As our minds remember the past, so do our bodies. The body remembers differently from the mind. The body’s memory is inscribed with indelible marks, acting as lasting influences on our lives. Not only individual memories, but also the collective memories of history and culture that a specific group has kept for a long time are built up layer by layer in the body and form the inspiration of performance artists. The featured works in this exhibition including Zen for Head by Paik Nam June, Balkan Erotic Epic by Marina Abramović, and Family Tree by Zhang Huan are gestures encompassing the cultural memories of the artists’ motherlands. Moreover, memory is political in that it can be mutated, forgotten, or recomposed by invisible forces. Asian Artists in this exhibition recompose collective memories, drawn from the modern and contemporary histories of their native countries, into performances, recalling memories that have been eliminated or mutated in the flow of history, and uncovering “social amnesia.” One method of performing history is through collective actions. In the 1960-1970s Korean performance artists, and Japanese avant-garde groups such as Zero Jigen and Hi Red Center, reacted to socio-political conditions through collective actions using their bodies. The photographs and videos in this exhibition present documentaries of their performances. Without joining collective actions, one artist can show artistic resistance against the authorities through minimal gestures. The acts of cutting newspaper (Sung Neungkyung), breathing in Tiananmen Square (Song Dong), and destroying antique pottery (Ai Weiwei) are gestures by artists facing massive institutions and their power through minimal resistance. Beginning with Hommage à John Cage (1959), Paik Nam June presented radical performances throughout the 1960s. Zen for Head premiered in the performance of Originale by Karlheinz Stockhausen on October 26, 1961, and was presented again in 1962 at the Fluxus International Festival of New Music at Museum Wiesbaden. The performance involves drawing lines with hair, a necktie, hands, and other objects that are soaked in ink and tomato juice and tracked across a long piece of paper laid out on the floor which turns into a flat artwork on which the trails of the performance remain. While this performance is an adaptation of a score written by La Monte Young in 1960, which instructs the performer to “draw a straight line PAIK Nam June / Zen for Head Undated / Ink on paper / 196x68cm and follow it,” it also embodies the principle of Nam June Paik Art Center collection “writing with one decisive stroke of the brush” in Photo by Nam June Paik Art Center, Nils CLAUS Eastern calligraphy as a cultural memory. © Nam June Paik Studios A member of the Beijing East Village, an experimental group that appeared after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989, Zhang Huan is a prominent artist who led China’s contemporary avant-garde art movement. Zhang’s well-known work, Family Tree is a documentary photography work in which three calligraphers write on the artist’s face from morning until evening. “The foolish man moves a mountain (愚公移山)” is a Chinese proverb written on his face along with quotes from fiction and the names of the artist’s family and acquaintances. As the performance progresses, writing in black ink gradually covers his entire face. This process is recorded in nine photographs. As more words are written, as the artist’s face is covered in black ink, his identity is gradually erased. The performance reveals that an individual’s identity is constantly reconstructed by his or her relationships with countless others, and ZHANG Huan / Family Tree / 2000 historical and cultural circumstances. / Chromogenic color prints / 127×102cm×(9) M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation © ZHANG Huan Since 1972, Marina Abramović has explored suffering, danger, and the physical and psychological limits of humans, using the body as her medium. Her performances from the 2000s are grounded in Balkan history and culture. Abramović produced the Balkan Erotic Epic in 2005. This colossal “epic” video composed of a total of 13 channels, was about sexuality in the ritualistic and ethnological sense, as it has been commonly discussed in the culture of the Balkan peninsula. In Balkan pagan rites, sexuality is a supernatural matter that originates not from man, but from God. Both the male and female sexual organs are an anthropological medium that not only repel evil, fertilize the earth, and bring loved ones back to health, but also heal the scars of the community. Set in a vast landscape, women expose their genitals and receive rain coming down from the sky and men commune with the earth. This is a ritualistic performance to channel supernatural erotic Marina ABRAMOVIĆ / Balkan Erotic Epic / energy to fertilize the earth, and heal the 2005, Serbia / Multi-channel video installation, color, individuals’ scars and the historical tragedy of the sound / Duration variable / Courtesy of Marina Abramović land. Archives and LIMA, Amsterdam / © Marina ABRAMOVIĆ Japanese-born Ono Yoko immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Ono has since been challenging the existing framework of the art world as a conceptual and performance artist. Her Cut Piece is one example. Including its premiere in Kyoto in 1964, Cut Piece was performed a total of five times until 1966, in the cities such as Tokyo, New York, and London. In the center of the stage, the artist is sitting quietly with a large pair of scissors laid in front of her. At the instruction “cut,” members of the audience get up on the stage one by one, cut the artist’s clothing with the scissors, and exit the stage with the cut piece.