SIB IX – Structured Bodies w/ Minkyung Choi, Weng San Sit, AFSAR, Agnieszka Roguski

How do body politics and urban development intersect? And what do answers to this question tell about the respondent’s standpoint? As video screening and conversation, Structured Bodies combines images with the imaginations and projections that create them. The evening puts the female* body as social arena centre stage; it explores ideas of youth, growth, community and locality in relation to processes of westernisation by following an (Asian) feminist perspective.

Screening:

A Manual for Timeless Youth, Minkyung Choi & Sit Weng San, video, 45 min, 2022 

A Manual for Timeless Youth is structured as a satirical step-by-step instructional video on the different ways to achieve eternal youth in Seoul and Singapore. Following the guidelines of “Erase, Control, Colonise, and Disguise”, the work bridges the artists’ embodied experiences, social phenomena in the wellness, anti-ageing, and biohacking industries with urban redevelopment and cutting-edge technological projects in their respective ‘post-colonised’ cities that have both achieved rapid economic growth.

After the screening, Mooni Perry & Hanwen Zhang (AFSAR), Minkyung Choi, and Weng San Sit will be in conversation with Agnieszka Roguski.

Structured Bodies is the 9th edition of Seeing Is Believing, anorak’s monthly screening and conversation series presenting artists’ moving image. 

The Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) was founded by Mooni Perry and Hanwen Zhang in 2020 and joined by Eugene Park and Yu’an Huang in 2022. AFSAR aims to establish connections between contemporary art, scholarly discourse, and activism anchored in (Asian) Feminist thought. AFSAR constructs a place for archiving contemporary feminist discourse and artistic research. Its online platform serves as a decentralised virtual space that brings together a wide range of practitioners from a variety of disciplines, fostering collective research to develop and support sustainable interactions.

Minkyung Choi is a South Korean visual artist currently based in Seoul. Based on video, performance, and often engaging in collaborations with other women, Choi’s practice responds to the patriarchal culture from a female perspective. She is a co-founder of the East Asian feminist art activism group Tomorrow Girls Troop.

Mooni Perry is a visual artist based in Berlin and Seoul. In the past few years, she has been exploring the idea of “double-fallen” beings, individuals who do not belong to either A or B. In her recent artistic endeavours, she uses video as her medium and draws on research to create narratives that are intricately woven together in both vertical and horizontal planes.

Agnieszka Roguski is a researcher, curator, and writer living in Berlin. Based on transdisciplinary methodologies, she focuses on performance and performativity, visual and (post-)digital cultures and ways to formulate transient, critical publics. She is the Artistic Director of M.1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung and co-founded the transcuratorial collective A.R. practice.

Weng San Sit is a Singaporean Artist and educator currently based in Los Angeles. Utilising primarily still and moving images, San’s work investigates the systems and power structures that create dissonance between inattentive, homogeneous representations of marginalised bodies and the reality of complex and multi-faceted identities.

Hanwen Zhang works interdisciplinary as a curator and artist. Her main focus lies in critical epistemology and methodology in relation to feminist and queer theory. Including art-based and performative research methods, her practice encompasses both research and production.