film stills © Shen Xin

Brine Lake (A New Body)

5 channel video and sound installation, 43:44, 2020

Brine Lake (A New Body) is an episodic, five-channel video and sound installation that performs as an abstract device to suspend assumptions around statelessness as a means to consider the potentialities of non-national and transnational relations and belonging. Set in a fictional iodine recycling factory, its two female protagonists converse in Korean, Japanese and Russian languages with two unseen employees (ghosts) whose visions are overtaken by the camera. Dialogs slip between ecology, technology, economy, and personal memory, which become one in the same. We learn of the element iodine – its naturally occurring origin in deep sea brine lakes in which animal corpses never decay, to its relational becoming – it’s visibility and versatility – through extraction, assimilation and interaction with other elements and hosts. The conversations begin to reveal the complexity of Korean immigrants’ experience in Russia and Japan – many rendered stateless through ethnic identification, persecution and forced migration – to their continued presence and essential participation in nation-state economies, yet persistent invisibility that asks for relationality to be drawn elsewhere – through language, family, emotion, land. Throughout the dialogs, identity and place of both the seen and unseen characters, are suspended, thus spaces are opened that deliberately stray from discourses of complicity within which the characters are recognized for. Suffering remains in place, somewhere, yet this somewhere is also nowhere. This protective space is communal for any active participant, including the audience, to reflect on histories of violent separation and movement from homelands via the mechanism of the nation-state and its invented communities, within which belonging has taken on new meaning.

Cast: Kang Yumi, Lee Jeong-ha

Additional Voices: Yuliya Kim, Galina Pak

Director, Writer and Editor: Shen Xin

Cinematographer: Johann Arens

Additional Camera: Shen Xin

Sound Recordist and Sound Designer: Yashaswini Raghunandan

Assistant Directors: Kyung Bin Koh, Kanitha Tith

Translators: Mire Lee, Maria Orlova, Kanoko Tamura

Colourist: Jason R. Moffat

Sound Mix and Edit: Aman Dubey & Gautam Pattani from Audio Academy, Jochen Jezussek, Human Diagnostics Laboratory

Recording Assistant: Smitha Chander

Supported by Rijksakademie Amsterdam, DeAppel Amsterdam, M+ Museum Hong Kong and Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.