Happening for SET
Happening for SET. November 5. 7~8 pm. 2015. 533 W 25th
Some time ago, my friend Na invited me to stage a performance in her exhibition SET. We’ve been talking about our work and the relationships that inspire the work. I met Na for the first time about ten years ago in South Korea, and since then we’ve only kept in touch sporadically. She was living in Amsterdam and then Seoul, and I was living mostly in New York. Alot has happened in the past ten years, I chose this performance as an opportunity to look toward the past.
The exhibition SET sprung out of a book of Na’s projects over the years, designed by Joris Kritis and published by Roma Publications. She told me it was exciting to work with another graphic designer to design her book, a gesture that may appear improbable because she’s usually the one designing other people’s books. However, she found joy in giving agency to another designer to steer the process into something unpredictable, uncertain and possibly unstable. After publication of the book, she re-created the book into a physical installation at Doosan Gallery in New York City. She then asked me to create a performance set in the exhibition.
We talked in depth about her process that resulted in SET. The SET is a collection of design materials she produced for clients and art projects, that are repositioned and decontextualized and presented through a set of genealogical studies of a designer. If you were to ask our profession, Na would be a graphic designer and I would be a performance artist, but our practices are uneasy to define clearly as a singular medium. My practice has been all over the place: technical R&D, performance, drawing, writing and teaching.I thought about what would be the SET for my work. I knew immediately that my SET will be a collaboration. I asked Lauren McCarthy, who’s a frequent collaborator and studiomate, and Anastasis Germanidis, who was a student at SFPC earlier this year, to collaborate on a performance piece.
The Happening for SET will be a chance to have conversation with the people in your memory. There will be reenactments and creative interpretation of our own works, life experiences and historic performance art works. It will be a set of unrehearsed happenings and scripted encounters. The evening will conjure the past and the present. After all, the past is never really only the past, when it’s recalled in the present.
I’m setting up the overarching structure of the performance, Lauren and Anastasis will each present participatory piece with multiple performers. I asked the students from my class, Performing Participation at NYU ITP (who presented their final piece at the gallery few weeks ago) and Andy Dayton and Becca Moore from SFPC to be the performers. However, the boundary between the performers and participants will very undoubtedly blurry.
The finissage will begin at 6pm. The performance will happen between 7~8pm on November 5th, 2015 at Doosan Gallery, 533 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
Happening for SET.
Directed by Taeyoon Choi
Featuring
Exhibition by Na Kim
