Korean artist Narae Jin’s video installations use theatre elements to analyse how we perceive our existence in the modern era. She tells Divya Kaushik about her inspirations from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Dorothy Smith’s standpoint theory
There’s nothing more dramatic than the incidents that we encounter on streets or in our neighbourhood. This real life drama is presented at its best in Korean artist Narae Jin’s video installations with some analysis at the Korean Cultural Centre.
Titled Dramascope, the exhibition reflects social construction of reality, culture and identity. Talking about the concept of the exhibition, the artist says, “Most of my works deal with society and communication. I have explored dramaturgy through the elements of theatre in my video installations. I believe that there’s no exact line between anything, even between material and immaterial.
So the medium merges with one another to convey an important message that has been derived from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It says that there are four stages of melting, ‘of earth into water, water into fire, fire into air and air into consciousness.’ Another message is taken from the standpoint theory of Dorothy Smith, a famous scholar in feminism.
The theory says that that feminist social science should be practiced from the standpoint of women or particular groups of women. Though my works are not related to feminism, I think the standpoint theory is something that can be applied to any sort of being. My works are about how we perceive society. How we perceive our existence in this modern age.”
Narae draws heavily from the theory of Dramaturgy, which is the study of social interaction in terms of theatrical performances and imagining ourselves as directors observing what goes on in the theatre of everyday life. “In dramaturgical sociology it is argued that the elements of human interactions are dependent upon time, place and audience.
In a nutshell, it says that we perform or behave in a certain manner or ‘carefully conduct’ ourselves when dealing with people. We are successful if the people around us view us as we want to be viewed,” says Narae and, therefore, she says there are elements of theatre in her artworks.
Apart from topics like communication, she also talks about a fragile line between imagination and reality through her art. “For example, once I did a performance in Korea and I did not record or document it. A month later, I asked the viewers what they remember about the performance. The idea was to convey that the way others see, hear or think about you make for your existence in today’s world.
This perception can be far away from the reality but this is how the society functions. In another project, that I call Collage Writing, I invite the audience to write, draw, paint or cut-paste a set of images to describe others. That exercise explains a lot of what we think,” she shares. As part of the East-West Festival, the Korean artist also collaborated with Indian artist Ajay Sharma.
“We had a chance to share our works and thoughts and we found out that we share similar thoughts about existence and perception. Also, I was developing more interest in the Indian crafts. Ajay is from a family of craftsmen and he was documenting lives of different craftsmen communities in India. During the exhibition, we are going to develop a short visual-text story about the Indian craftsmen,” she says.