Zarouhie Abdalian’s Flutter (2010) is an installation composed of mirrored mylar that ripples in response to sub-audio sine sweeps transmitted through tactile transducers. Made in the summer of 2010, as Oakland residents braced for the verdict in the case of Johannes Mehserle, the police officer who murdered Oscar Grant, Abdalian reflects on the work in its current context and presentation at KADIST San Francisco:
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“Installed in 2023 in San Francisco’s Mission District, the unstable image reflected in Flutter belies the relative calm pictured at KADIST’s 20th Street location. Banks are liquidated, layoffs are announced, and ever wider wars for capitalist profit loom. Rupture is the unavoidable expression of an unstable system. Here, viewers encounter their reflection within this process of inevitable change.”
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Through Abdalian’s play of mirrors, the viewer encounters their reflection, but the vibration distorts the image, making self-recognition impossible and suggesting the fragility of identity. In a similar act of distortion, Jesse Chun manifests visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. In O (for various skies) (2021), Chun decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing [removed];Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry while interweaving Korean folklore about the moon. The video installations are paired with mirrors on the floor: drawing from Korean shamanistic uses of the mirror as a sacred object that reflects, holds, and protects.
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Zarouhie Abdalian’s Flutter (2010) and Jesse Chun’s O (for various skies) (2021) are on view as part of From the KADIST collection: Be here, or even better, be nowhere, alongside works by Rocky Cajigan, Nikita Gale, Shilpa Gupta, Baseera Khan, Tarik Kiswanson, Alexis Smith, and Cecilia Vicuña through August 12, 2023.
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Jesse Chun, O (for various skies) (2021), Installation view, From the KADIST collection: Be here, or even better, be nowhere, KADIST San Francisco, April 14 to August 12, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection. Photo by Robert Divers Herrick.
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On (un)language: Jesse Chun
A screening program followed by a conversation with Erika Mei Chua Holum and Jo-ey Tang
Thursday, June 15, 2023. Doors [removed] pm, Event 6 pm
Jesse Chun’s moving image poems, short films, drawings, and installations address language, translation, and [removed];On the occasion of From the KADIST collection: Be here, or even better, be nowhere, KADIST presents a screening of 3 video works by Chun, followed by a conversation on unfixing language and its politics for alternate poetics with Erika Mei Chua Holum, Assistant Curator, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and KADIST curator-in-residence, and Jo-ey Tang, Director, KADIST San Francisco.
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Wang Tuo, Smoke & Fire (2018), Installation view, The Screening Room: Wang Tuo, The Northeast Tetralogy, KADIST San Francisco, April 14 to August 12, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, artwork licensed by KADIST.
Photo by Robert Divers Herrick.
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Amongst the interwoven narratives in Distorting Words (2019) are those related to the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the present-day story of a man who avenged his mother’s death 22 years later. The second part of The Northeast Tetralogy expands on the transformative powers of “pan-shamanization” which for the artist, explores historical reincarnation as a medium to connect time and space. The tetralogy transcends the otherworldly and the profane, fact, and fiction, and past and present to probe how we recover and reflect on cultural and political [removed];
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Kadist Programs around the World
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Now
Sharjah Biennial 15
through June 11, 2023
through July 21, 2023
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Soon
KADIST San Francisco
Erika Mei Chua Holum, assistant curator, Blaffer Art Museum, curator-in-residence
June 6-16, 2023
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