In partnership with Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), the Festival is pleased to present a special lecture by visiting Korean artist Ayoung Kim, convened by Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway and theorist Norie Neumark.  

Interested in the relationship between language, sound and image, acclaimed Korean artist Ayoung Kim produces narratives in various forms. Actively working with music composers and film/theatre collaborators, Kim uses the device of storytelling and narrative structure to evoke alternative forms of reading, listening and thinking about our present human conditions. In this lecture, the artist will connect two major installations presented as part of the Festival through notions of porosity and plasticity.

In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept is a major sound installation sewn from sources as varied as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Noah’s Ark and the tragic capsizing of the Korean ferry in 2014, to restage a long forgotten mythical flood. From these diverse threads Ayoung spins a vast audio-visual web of meaning in which events speak to each other across the void. Surging beneath it all is the dark lifeblood of human history: oil, which wends its way from the Bible and Quran to the conflicts that grip the planet today.

Porosity Valley, Portable Holes furthers Ayoung Kim’s signature fascination with the invisible forces that underride the world, here imagining subterranean geologies as living beings and underground stories pushing and pulling beneath the ground on which we stand. Inspired by notions of porosity, the migration of bodies and information, plot holes and portable holes as plot devices, it is a strange meeting of ideas that can only co-exist uneasily, conveyed through an immersive video installation and overlapping cacophony of the real and virtual, the aural and visual.

AYOUNG KIM (born 1979 in Seoul) held a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2016, following on from her residency at the Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the Palais de Tokyo’s research lab in 2015-16. She participated in the 56th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015) and the Serpentine Galleries’ public programme (London, 2016). Ayoung Kim recently exhibited at Maraya Art Centre (Sharjah, 2015), SeMA (Seoul, 2014), the Leeum (Seoul, 2012), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2011), 176/Zabludowicz Collection (London, 2011) and the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, 2011).

NORIE NEUMARK is a theorist and sound/media artist. She is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, and Affiliated Researcher of the Seed Box: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Laboratory based at Linköping University, Sweden. She is founding editor of international peer-reviewed journal, Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts. Her 2017 monograph, Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (MIT Press) explores voice and new materialism. Collaborating with Maria Miranda as out-of-sync, their work has been commissioned and exhibited widely nationally and internationally. 

Presented with Monash University Museum of Art