I have often – purely theoretically – experienced what outsiders mean. What it is like, for example, to be queer in countries where it is still seen as something perverted and unacceptable, where your sense of identity and body experience is defined as “wrong”. But still, I probably never really understood it. As a white, heterosexual woman, I have unconsciously taken my own insideness for granted. This realization hits me like a punch in the stomach in the face of Kim Hankyul’s art project “Bildungsroman”. BODILY GHOST: The exhibition is full of abstracted elements that in various ways refer to something bodily. Photo: Kunstdok / Tor Simen Ulstein Chaotic installation It takes time before the work opens up and begins to speak to me. At first I just feel disappointed and endlessly tired. I have read about the project beforehand and am excited about the idea. Hankyul will follow the big education project in the seams. Based on developmental novels, he looks at the norms which, among other things, have been instilled in us through literature through generations. He will reflect on the human body, and what separates the beautiful and the normal from the monstrous and deviant. LIVES UP TO THE HYPE: Kim Hankyul (b. 1990 in Busan, South Korea) lives and works in Bergen. He was nominated as artist of the year 2022 by Subjekt. Photo: Silje Waaktaar Åsheim When I enter the exhibition hall, I can’t immediately find any of this again. All I see is a drum kit playing by itself, and a rather chaotic accumulation of large, old pink pillow-like elements surrounded by a tangle of wires and technical devices. From high racks on either side of the hall hang strips of leather on which detached sentences are embossed, and I think that here the ideas are just pasted like labels on the outside. MISERABLE LEATHER: On strips of leather hang sentences taken out of context, but which nevertheless carry within them a loneliness and a despair. The sound of deep sleep It is late afternoon, and due to train chaos it has taken me an unreasonable amount of time to get to Lillestrøm. Demotivated, I sink down onto the carpeted floor and close my eyes. That’s when I hear the installation. Not just the repetitive rhythms of the plastic strips whipping over the cymbals, but the sound of a deep sleep. AUTOMATIC RHYTHMS: The installation also has a rich soundscape. Among other things, a self-playing drum set consisting of cymbals. A breath that rises and falls and the rumbling and humming of a challenged digestion, but also belching, hiccups, farting, snoring and sighing. And I think that at least, if nothing else, it is quite relaxing to sit like this and breathe in time with this being. When I open my eyes, it’s as if the soundscape has transformed the installation for me. In what I first saw as meaningless chaos, I now see something human and corporeal. FAMOUS SOUND IMAGE: The body sounds also help to see the human aspect of the installation, which is a strange hybrid between something mechanical and something textile. Photo: Kunstdok / Tor Simen Ulstein The body’s inherent beauty and ugliness I begin to think about what it really means to have a body, and how delicate the balance is between the body’s beauty and ugliness. Just think how beautiful we think the long black hairs growing on our eyelids are, while hairs sticking out of our noses are considered disgusting. As I work my way through Hankyul’s forest of quotes taken from older and newer educational novels, I feel a growing lump in my stomach. These are of course sentences taken out of context, but which nonetheless carry a loneliness and despair: “Warped Child”, “Mutilated”, “Becoming someone else for a night”, “Just go home periodically to renew my sense of horror”. In the 19th-century French author Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarassine”, the male protagonist falls in love with a castrato singer whom he believes to be a woman. When he realizes that the object of his desire is in reality a man, characteristics such as monster and harpy are used. And perhaps we are here at a core point: the unbearableness of people and phenomena that will not fit into our safe, rigid categories. THE PHYSICAL, MATERIAL: The installation consists of a chaotic mixture of textile elements and technical devices. Photo: Kunstdok / Tor Simen Ulstein Takes to tears Over the centuries, the bodily ambiguity has aroused disgust and aggression. It sits like a spinal cord reflex in the culture that unfortunately we still haven’t fully overcome, and which, for example, makes it demanding to be transgender even today. As I read through the quotes and listen to the imaginary body, I suddenly feel myself crying. I, who initially felt disappointed and tired, leave the exhibition gripped and with a feeling of having recognized something important. This is how the exhibition actually became a kind of educational journey for me as well. news reviews Photo: Kunstdok / Tor Simen Ulstein Title: «Bildungsroman» Artist: Kim Hankyul Place: Nitja center for contemporary art, Lillestrøm When: 14 January 2023–19. February 2023
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“Bildungsroman” by Kim Hankyul – Reviews and recommendations
