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Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)
Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)
Born 1977 in Busan, KR – lives and works in Amsterdam, NL, and Brussels, BE
Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020) is a shamanic healing journey addressing the colonial narratives behind interracial and international adoption, and specifically the historical relations between The Netherlands and Korea. The film takes the colonial print Een Schaman ofte Duyvel-Priester [Shaman or Devil’s Priest from the Tungus, 1692] by Nicolaes Witsen as the starting point for a spiritual journey through time. The seventeenth-century print is the first Western depiction of a shaman. It marks the beginning of a long history of racialized and infantilizing descriptions of Asian people by white Europeans. The caricature image was later used by missionaries to marginalize shamanism.
Four Months, Four Million Light Years time-travels from contemporary Dutch society and the participation of 3,418 Dutch soldiers in the deadly Korean War (1950–53) to early Dutch colonial descriptions of Asian people. The artist herself is an adoptee from Korea and grew up in The Netherlands. In The Netherlands alone around 40,000 people have been adopted from the Global South, often through child trafficking and with falsified documents. The four months of the title refer to the time it took to complete the paperwork for a Korean child in the lucrative interracial adoption industry that flourished after the Korean War, an industry that continues to live off the same colonial imagery from 300 years ago.
In the room, textile banners surround the video projection. Here, shamanic poems, songs and visions invoke the ancestors for support. The work is an homage to those who have been cut off from their mothers, fathers, family, ancestors, land, culture, and spirits.
Stefan Govaart
Weaving Solidarity
Renata Cervetto and Duygu Örs
Q&A
Expresiones de la locura: el arte de los enfermos mentales
Hans Prinzhorn
Monograph
El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala
Chronicle
Invitation to the Species: Cecilia Vicuña
Tamaas / Cecilia Vicuña
Podcast
Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) in Berlin
A conversation between María Berríos and Melanie Roumiguière
Conversation
Fragments of the Artist’s Diary, Berlin 11.2019–1.2020
Virginia de Medeiros
Diary
