CCS BARD

Artists: Sung Hwan Kim and Myriam Yates

Different intensities of memory charge certain moments to the surface while forcing others to fall back. The work of Myriam Yates and Sung Hwan Kim map the shifting magnitude of memory, and the disruption inherent to its repetition. As a time-based practice, a publication performatively enacts other scenes of spectatorship, as supplement to exhibition’s temporal register. Operating with or even against both artworks and the exhibition space, it swells other durations.

The works in the exhibition include Amphithéâtre (2010), Yates’ diptych video, which shows a preternatural racetrack slated for demolition alongside stables where horses still reside; and Racetrack-Superstar-Ghost(2011), which follows the construction of a U2 bandstand on the same grounds, complicating the site’s various streams of memory. Alongside these is Kim’s fictional documentary, Summer Days in Keijo-written in 1937 (2007), based on a travelogue written by a Swedish zoologist 70 years before, when “Kyungsung”, the former name for Seoul, was pronounced Keijo under Japanese rule. This recapitulated journey is made contemporary to the building projects of the 1960s, themselves vulnerable to redevelopment in the present. In visiting alternate temporalities, the documentary obscures the nature of our return, making available a narrative whose arc and place is entangled with those of others.