Let us dance (2014-2019) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3356
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Plateau Museum, Seoul, South Korea; Grand Palais, Paris, France & Arnolfini, Bristol, England.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- -
- Year of first performance
- 2014
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.5223329
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Let Us Dance was inspired by the landmark, 2008 candle lit demonstrations in Seoul, involving mass participation by teenage girls through social media, challenging authority’s perception of passive and socio politically irrelevant youth. Commissioned for the Plateau Museum, Seoul in 2014, Let Us Dance includes a
collaborative flash mob performance, also staged in Paris and Bristol, and large scale embroidery Burning Love 2014. Focusing on this historical event Hong explores the transformative potential of collective emotional subjectivity the present, to ask:
1. How might flash mob performance challenge the status of an artist as well the institutional structures that boundary art and social spaces?
2.How can the concept of affect become more operational in mobilising acts of resistance to prevailing socio political hierarchies?
3.How can the collectively formed emotion of an historical event be conveyed and reinterpreted through movement and stitch?
The 2008 Demonstration against US Beef imports, went unreported despite its significance in the Korean Democracy movement. Sharing archival images, Let Us Dance invites female teenage street dancers to respond to this historical event by taking over the gallery space unannounced, dancing to soundtracks from their mobile phones and then leaving, delivering control over the artwork to the girls. Echoing the candlelit protest, it highlights the transformative potential in the juxtaposition of 2 contradictory systems.
Developed closely with the performance was Burning Love (2014), a large embroidery work based on a magnified online image of the demonstration aiming to convey and immortalise the intensity of the teenagers collectively formed emotion. Informed by Deleuze's’ concept of affect (A Thousand Plateaus 1980) Hong’s
methods enable Let Us Dance to operate as a self organising collective consciousness against exclusive centres of institutional power, interpreting moments of history as an ongoing act of participation for an emerging generation in the present.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
