Seoyoung Chang: Skid
A film exploring how even as we slow down with age, capitalism continues to speed up the world around us
A film exploring how even as we slow down with age, capitalism continues to speed up the world around us
2022 / single channel video / 13min 52sec
As the pace of the world continually speeds up under capitalism, we feel the physical and mental decline of our aging bodies — namely, our loss of mobility and computing power —more and more keenly. Skid depicts this accelerating present and the decelerating ‘I’ within it, braking and sliding, capturing the friction that results when the speed outside the body is different from the speed within it. The temporality of petroleum (produced over a long period of time but consumed in an instant and used to compress space-time), a substance that speeds time up outside the body, is explored as one such relative metric of temporality inside the body. Passengers in a virtual car, viewers find themselves going along for a ride that follows this careening stream of thought.
About Seo Young Chang
Seo Young Chang employs the moving image as a proxy for the body in her multimedia installations, exploring the relationship between the body and time. Her current interest is in the way disease and aging can shift perceptions of space-time, as well as how this shifted space-time is fed back into the body. Through wordplay, contradiction, and metaphor, her works traverse virtual and physical realms, moving in and out of the body and across the uncharted timescape between life and death. In her installations, viewers are invited to face their own corporeal existence. Chang has presented a number of solo exhibitions, including ‘Skid’ (Sindoh Art Space), ‘A Blinding Future’ (Amado Art Space), and ‘beginning to end at the beginning’ (Doosan Gallery Seoul), and has participated in group exhibitions at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, MMCA Korea, and the Seoul Museum of Art, among others.
