MemoRandom Project: A (我 [a]: self, I, us), G (知 [ji]: to know), 2015, single-channel video installation with sound, 10:50 minutes (A), 8:17 minutes (G). ©Hahkyung Darline Kim.

“When the Korean War was in full swing, did my maternal grandmother’s friend Soonyi (pseudonym) become an actual pro-left activist or was she a victim of the Red Scare? Regardless of the truth, the Korean War left a stigma against the commies and an unforgettable trauma to the individual Soonyi. She was one of the many unknown victims of ideology, unrecorded by official history. I believe there are things we need to ask and answer before we get to the truth” (Hahkyung Darline Kim, 2015).

MemoRandom is a modular video installation project that translates a story-event from the Korean War regarding the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl using the pseudonym Soonyi. Recounted by Seo Nan-seok, an octogenarian who lived through the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War, the veracity of the story is as dubious as the instability of the conditions surrounding her testimony.

Each distinct in its mode of representation, the modules comprising MemoRandom approach the story-event in a way that informs the connection between fictive elements in oral and visual storytelling, factuality in performances of the everyday and of remembrance, and the production of historical knowledge. As loose translations of the story of Soonyi, the modules viewed together are intended to offer an uneven but larger picture that performs as a synecdoche for the Cold War in Korea.

Hahkyung Darline Kim’s films and video works have been featured at iGong Archive Screening (Seoul, 2019), 4th Diaspora Film Festival (Incheon, 2015), 41st Seoul Independent Film Festival (2015), El ojo cojo XI Festival cinematográfico internacional, (Madrid, 2015), and 16th Seoul Independent Documentary Film & Video Festival (Seoul, 2016). Kim was awarded with the Beginners Project Grant (2016) and First Art Support Grant (2018), and from the Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture (2018).

Presented in this exhibition are modules A (我 [a]: self, I, us) and G (知 [ji]: to know).