A Project by Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo
MOTHERNIGHT
For her project in the category Future Traditions in Music, mentored by Du Yun, artist Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo is creating a multichannel video installation that confronts how fertility, eugenics, and class shape the idea of the family based on ethnic belonging.
The project interrogates colonial legacies and male desire, while examining how racial and class lineage function within family dynasties. In order to fathom this long-standing tradition, she argues, it is important to understand what family legacies reveal about our fears, fantasies, and expectations, and how power and anxiety inform and sustain this cultural phenomenon.
In MOTHERNIGHT she dismantles the institution of the family while redefining it beyond racial kinship. The installation thus imagines family as a relative experience that brings us together, rather than sets us apart. In doing so, the project seeks to adopt empathetic strategies that resist historical oppression and attempts to reconcile the past while posing critical questions on the future of kinship, relationships, and the descent of fear.
The work combines a collage of storytelling traditions based on nursemaid lullabies, village ghost operas, funeral rituals, the shaman tale of Princess Bari, and the iconic South Korean films The Housemaid and Lady Vengeance to reveal how personal as well as collective histories intersect throughout various cultures and time periods.
D’Angelo will premiere the three-channel video work at the digital Forecast Forum. Here, she talks about her artistic approach and interest in exploring how postwar politics shape our current realities:
