APRiCot Garden 2025: Research as Regenerative Practice. Performance by Yen Noh: “In Between Seances”
Performance with sound piece, textile banners, rice, 2022/2025
In Between Seances concerns the subterranean as a resistant yet haunting force. This multi-phased project engages with the 1982 novel DICTEE by the Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The performance is an aural and oral activation of the (study) score transposed from the novel. With a specific focus on the photocopy of a Korean inscription in DICTEE—which was written by indentured Koreans in a Japanese-operated coal mine under Japan’s colonization of Korea—it creates a dialogue with Cha, Korean folk music and wind. Throughout, the performance engages with the physical, emotional and psychological residue of death—Cha’s death, the unjust death evoked in the novel, and the ongoing death in Gaza. “How does anyone remain living in such a structure of death?” Thinking along this question addressed by the poet Don Mee Choi, it touches on the possibility for a spectral collectivity as a poetics of dispossession.
About Yen Noh
About: APRiCot Garden 2025: Research as Regenerative Practice