Areumnari Ee ~ Usghosts

Watch Areumnari's 20 minute presentation, for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS which took place at State of Concept in Athens -  June 2018. 

Usghosts

Summary

Areumnari begins her presentation with a warning to the audience about the directness to be expected, then asks the audience to take a printed guide she prepared from a pile.  She addresses everyone standing in front of a screen, wearing a black t-shirt featuring a white image of a soldier with a meander at the bottom and text reading “This is Sparta”.  Upon her sign, everyone can open the paper which has been sewn together, by ripping the pages apart to reveal their content. In the meantime, Areumnari takes a seat in the audience, her hair bound into a frontal ponytail covering her face. A video starts playing on the screen – we first hear church bells ring and then see a slideshow of partly transparent and superimposed still images of unpopulated urban scenes, ruins, temples, construction sites – all the footage seems to have been shot in Greece, likely in Athens.

As the video continues, the sounds in the background change. One can discern traffic sounds, car horns, voices, music reverberating through a public space, in short: the hum of a hustling, bustling city. In addition, Areumnari recites a live voiceover in Korean from her seat amongst the spectators. The translation can be found in the opened guide booklet, the text fragments are part dialogue, part poetic prose and quotations of several authors, circling around sadness and melancholy, around birds as constant nomads, a symbol of “anxious change” unable to answer a human’s questions about their presumed precarity in English, “songs for fun and songs for meaning”, ancient gods, being lost, contemporary urban navigation with the help of technology, new things on old land that has been damaged and dug in, beneath it the “weary souls of warriors, sad souls of broken lovers, the skeptic souls of scholars”.

The moving, melancholic and slightly disorienting presentation ends with the words: “Take me to a nice place, take me to a life”.

Responses

Maria Lind

Maria Lind reflects on the emotional and intellectual impact of Areumnari’s “gripping” presentation, emphasizing the unique combination of elements – words, images, personal presence, and performance – that make it a compelling work of art. While hard to define precisely, she mentions as reasons the rigor of each of them as well as their combination, which remains vague. The interplay between the components creates a sort of "osmosis," which she deeply appreciates. She notes that mourning and melancholia have reappeared with some of the previous presenters as well, in this case particularly through the radical superimposition of images of decay and ruins. This reminded her of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a novel in which the disintegration of one system gives way to another, a situation that is similar to what is evoked by Areumnari’s presentation. She also mentions the Norwegian artist Mathias Faldbakken as areference regarding the practice of imprinting. Maria Lind also valued the incorporation of Athens as a location and mentions a specific punctum for her – seeing a film poster of The Battle of Algiers with English text, the film's way of dealing with radical, violent resistance against an oppressive regime relating to what was just seen and read in the presentation.

Bassam El Baroni

Bassam El Baroni found the presentation very effective and was prompted to ask, what kind of labor it involved. Firstly, he indicates the labor of channeling – of multiple layers of history, of struggle. The enactment of this channeling evoked to him the sense of a Greek tragedy, lifted into the contemporary through the media employed. The second type of labor he lists is of a curatorial nature, in developing these composite images, combining different histories, enmeshed into universal images. According to Bassam El Baroni, this labor of universality is difficult to accomplish, which might explain why the work struck such a range of emotional registers. He points to what he calls a “tattoo aesthetic”, referring to the fonts used throughout the presentation and connecting to the idea of something that is “imprinted into our memories for revival”. This to him generates a “cross-class register”, as the visual language has a populistic and very powerful dimension, reminiscent of engravings.

Speaking about the many ruins featured, he mentions Walid Sadek, a scholar from Beirut who talks about the necessity of understanding the ruin as something to cherish and playing an important role in formulating a future. To live with the ruin as more than reminders of the past is an important concept to him, one that he believes Areumnari is addressing with the complex layering of the work. Adding to this, he points out that most of the snippets of texts are from other people, translated and channeled in Korean by Areumnari. On a final note, he links the interesting multiple translation processes at play to the idea of the layering of histories, languages, cultural identities.

Rachel O’Reilly

Rachel O’Reilly very much enjoyed the “tension between expression and containment” in the presentation which she describes as an affective fragment coming out of Areumnari’s thesis. She says that while in this specific context it may not have been necessary to have the warning at the beginning, she took pleasure in it. Crediting the “wild analytical effort” of combining spatial biography with the history of a city, she also notes the explored relationship between everyday religion and late global capital, with a feminist analytic that appears in the performance as well as the academic work. The “wildness” of the performance and analysis is attributed to Areumnari’s ability not to reduce it to a singular position and her keen awareness of the diverse roles and cultural experiences of women. According to Rachel O’Reilly, Areumnari continuously answers the question what it means to be “unapologetically out of place and uncomposed”. She “lets the punk fight with the melancholic” and vice versa and the resulting energy feels both specific and productively unresolved to her.

About Areumnari Ee