Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos operates on. We create, design, share, and exchange our work and knowledge on this important meeting place. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people who engage with Kudos. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.
@_sooms_
https://soomsjeong.cargo.site/
Unlearning Chairs
Soomin Jeong is an emerging curator and writer from Seoul, currently based on unceded Gadigal land. She has gained experience across arts administration and curatorial practices, including working as a curatorial assistant for the all-night sound art event Radio Insomnia, as a gallery intern at COMA and as a development intern at Sydney Writers’ Festival, where she supported external partnerships and media engagement. She works as an art administrator at SAMAG (Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group), with a focus on partnerships and development in the arts. Alongside this, her independent curatorial practice is mainly focused on stretching and extending time through exhibition-making practice to examine chrono-politics. Recalling leaked time and memories, Jeong brought the caring slowness and unlearning process in knowledge-making and sharing as a communal labour.
The curatorial practice of Unlearning Chairs started from a very personal experience of constant frustration of learning a new language, culture and rushing into the right track. Life becomes a continuous process of learning and sometimes it feels like a stopless race. What if there’s some point to having a seat in the middle of the race of learning? I propose the chairs as the place to unlearn. Unlearning is pausing, forgetting, stopping, not-knowing, and sometimes rebelling against what holds us tight. But we definitely have to back to learning as well. Chairs exist in a state of limbo, like unlearning itself. We study, but we also rest on chairs. We enjoy solitude, but we also have conversations on them. We sit even while we are on our way somewhere. I noted that chairs become the place where unlearning happens without us noticing between farewell and arrival, oblivion and memory, discomfort and comfort, pausing and continuing.
There were invisible three sections of the exhibition: Unlearning Languages, Memories and Everyday Life. Moon Boyoung’s ‘Parachute Bird’ and Sirinya Stuebe’s ‘Langhwaje’ series invites the audiences to the world of exophonic text through reading poetry and eating edible sculptures. The action naturally made the audiences linger in the space with artworks longer and experience the moment of frustration that the second-language speakers normally can encounter in their daily life. In the Unlearning Memories section, Estelle Yoon, Cassandra Karam and Liana Berzins touch the seats, the warmth of memories leaving or staying their invisible way. When we think loving is also learning, what is unlearning when it’s left? As time goes by, something for memories has gone as Yoon captured on ‘Portrait of My Mother’ and embracing the displacement that made Karam can’t be together mourning her grandfather’s loss through painting. Berzine explored the way of transmission of Lativan culture and myths through her improvisational process of drawing. A busy love of family and culture is entering the stage of unlearning by letting go of something, admitting the absence and twisting the residues. In the last section of Unlearning Everyday Life, Lige Qiao and Sirinya Stuebe address the sense of sitting somewhere to trace the neglected feeling from the busyness(being busy) by showing the sense of urban city life. How does the fluidity of productivity make people transparent, do nothing and forget ourselves? Qiao showed the videowork and photo book captured the durational public transportation journey sitting on the anonymous transportation chairs in Chongqing. By doing nothing and unlearning moments on the transportation, they found hidden beauty. Stuebe also invites people to sense themselves as our own bodies through two multi-sensory textile books. Escaping and unlearning educated social roles, people can focus on their own sensory reaction.
Unlearning Chairs had three public programs during the exhibition period. I sourced the chairs from Haymarket vendors and provided the common sitting area in the centre of the gallery to activate the organic chat and interaction among audiences. On the opening night, Stuebe did a food sharing performance with ‘Langhwaje Bahryar’. We also had a round table style artist talk with around 15 audiences sharing their own experience in Haymarket, jumping across different cultures and the personal definition of unlearning. In addition, in collaboration with Western Sydney based indie music producer Hyzran Kodar, we made a six curated music playlist inspired by the curatorial concept and each artist’s practice. For the closing event, we held the silent reading rave with the playlist. The audiences sat on the chairs reading the poetry works, touching the sensory books and doing meditation with artworks. It was a communal unlearning action.