5100:Pentagon (2014, 2017) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3355
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Biennale Hall, Gwangju, South Korea & Royal Academy, London, 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.5223230
- 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
- 5100:Pentagon was commissioned and performed for the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014, and restaged in 2017 as part of Block Universe Festival, at the Royal Academy in London. The performance focuses on the violent Gwangju uprising on 18 May 1980, a pivotal moment in South Korea’s democracy movement. Exploring collective memory, modes of memorialisation and the potential of group subjectivity to challenge socio political hierarchies through performance, Hongs research asks 4 questions:
1. How can the principle of flash mob be utilized as a means of performance operating as both commemoration and resistance towards prevailing social norms?
2. How can a seminal moment in history be reinterpreted as an embodied experience in the present through collective performance?
3.Can social media function as a means of challenging notions of authorship and facilitating wider autonomy in art making?
4. Can each iteration of the same performance but by different groups of participants, be witnessed as a series of unique events rather than repetitions?
5100: Pentagon was a ritualistic, flash mob performance, self-organised through an open call on social media for citizens to participate by accessing a web tutorial of gestural movements, inspired by photographs in the May 18 Democratic Archive, and then developed by Hong in collaboration with 2 choreographers. Repeating the same gestures, each iteration was performed differently by separate groups of participants, with no restrictions in age, gender or experience, accompanied by Hong’s adapted version of a popular protest song ‘A Song of May’.
The project sheds new light on an unexplored moment in history, inscribing it, through repeated, interpretive re-enactments, into an embodied affective experience in the present. Hongs methods uncover the mobilising potential of charged collective encounter, enabling a performance model that can be repeatedly restaged by successive generations to challenge existing power structures.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
