Kim Hankyul, Forest_Sound_Motor_Machine.mov at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo

Forest_Sound_Motor_Machine.mov by Kim Hankyul, at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, 17/10/2024 – 17/11/2024.

Kim Hankyul’s project Forest_Sound_Motor_Machine.mov is a multimedia installation that travels across dimensions and resolutions, reality and simulation, sound and visuals. The exhibition actively adapts dissonance as its main method of expression, questioning the truthfulness of media, that is, the platform of representation for culture and identities that we most familiarly encounter in our daily lives. In terms of both visual and auditory aspects, the work utilises a broad spectrum of materials and technologies at hand, and repurposes them to serve for a plausible but necessarily failing imitation. The exhibition, composed of two corresponsive works, maximises inconsistent and inauthentic traits of images through blatant ripoffs to imitate a forest, seeming as a part of a film production set. Sound images betray visual images, and the dramatic immersion is constantly interrupted by the bright exposure of backstage settings. The arrangement is devised from the artist’s interest in the trending of internet aesthetics and the arbitrary nature of images. In the daily environment of confronting an uncontrollable excess of images and information, the origins of images get lost and gone, while the images are being shuffled as memes and contents and being doomed to be misunderstood. Images do not ‘re-present’ events, nor correspond to the events at their origin, and once they are born, they thrive in their own lives. Kim Hankyul brings in this paradoxical dynamic between images and events, by clearly separating them on the level of historical events. The project departed from a war veteran’s interview and his recounts on the events of death and injuries and the detached perception of reality following the repetitive screening of those events. In constructing the work, while images keep being created in a chain with precedent images on site, they constantly slip away from one another, pulling our bodies between the authentic and the simulated experiences. And through this, the work raises questions about what it means to be a responsible consumer of images, and how political understandings are formed in this era.