November 4 – 28, 2009
PETER BREGG
HOSTAGE: THE 1979 CRISIS IN IRAN
Images were taken by CP Photojournalist Peter Bregg during the 444 days that 52 United States Embassy staff were held hostage in Iran. This exhibit marks the 30th anniversary of the crisis that started it.
11 Davies Ave. # 303
www.ixgallery.ca
November 12 - December 12, 2009
IT WILL ALL BE DIFFERENT: MING WONG AND JIN-ME YOON AT TRINITY SQUARE VIDEO
Reel Asian and TSV are pleased to present the work of two renowned artists, Berlin/Singapore-based Ming Wong and Vancouver’s Jin-me Yoon. Central to the works of both Wong and Yoon is the conflict between body and place—a conflict that is represented by the exchange between the artists’ bodies and the transitional spaces into which they insert themselves.
In Angst Essen / Eat Fear, Ming Wong plays all the characters in a densely layered restaging of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s seminal film about love between cultural outsiders. Using green-screen compositing, Wong is able to appear on screen as both Ali, a young Moroccan immigrant worker, and Emmi, a German cleaning woman – as well as all the secondary characters.
In a pivotal moment from the original film, Emmi and Ali are refused service at an outdoor café. The couple imagines a “somewhere”— a place of reprieve that, when visited together, will alter the reality at hand. “When we get back,” Emmi says, “it will all be different.” With his recreation of this scene, Wong suffers the same indignation: the alienation is echoed as his own race and gender are inserted into the narrative. His redoubled return to this material assures difference.
Jin-me Yoon’s performance-based video series, As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan), features the artist, clad in black, crawling on the streets of Japan like an alien creature or a wounded soldier. These rigorous actions evoke scenes of evasion or survival combat techniques. Her body moves through Kannawa District’s urban renewal, through a former U.S. army base converted into a park, and across an atomic treatment centre. Yoon’s odd physical feats do not fit here. The contrast of her clothing against the landscape makes it seem as though she was composited atop the scene, hovering about its surface. Exploring the conflict between her body and these places is twinned with her identity as a Korean-Canadian foreign to Japan. Yoon’s haunting work creates a new, uneasy space for us to consider ideas of identity and nationalism.
Ming Wong lives and works in Berlin and Singapore. He represented Singapore at the 2009 Venice Biennale where he received a Special Mention for his solo exhibition, “Life of Imitation.”
Jin-Me Yoon lives and works in Vancouver and teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and was shortlisted for the 2009 Grange Prize. She is represented by the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
Reel Asian thanks the Japan Foundation for its support.
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376, Toronto
www.trinitysquarevideo.com
