STRANGE MEETINGS, 2017
Installation: Projected HD video with sound: single/dual sided version (11:08 min/4:55 min), HD video 09:08 min, circular aluminum dibond print 60 cm Ø, archive. Dimensions and constellation variable
In the 1970s, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among US soldiers stationed in South Korea became a bilateral crisis. Strange Meetings explores how this history resonates in the present by documenting a former STD treatment facility in Soyosan near the North Korean border where sex workers servicing US soldiers were detained against their will. A host of strange meetings, the building today materially bears witness to the entangled relations behind its establishment and the impossibility of enforcing strict borders.
The video shows the interior and exterior of the decaying building, which today is a host of strange meetings. The floor of the building is dense with rubbish and the building structure is being encroached upon by the surrounding vegetation. Knotted together, distinctions between inside and outside, architecture and debris, are dissolved. The exterior of the building is the site of another strange meeting: each weekend a fire-blowing drag performer utilizes the backside of the building as a backdrop for a performance attended by an aging local audience, complicating the relationship between past and present, overriding but potentially also purging the violent history of the site.
Strange Meetings - video excerpt
Video stills Strange Meetings. HD video, single channel, 11:08 min
Trace Evidence. Circular aluminum diabond print 60 cm Ø
Sample from former STD (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) facility photographed through a microscope and fused with a microscope image of contaminated blood cells.
Video stills Entanglements. HD video 9:08 min
The video Entanglements shows the hands of a woman who was forcibly detained at an STD treatment facility in the 1970s. While she meticulously draws a map of the building from her memory, she describes in detail the architecture of the STD treatment facility and how the daily life of her and other women detained there was strictly managed and regulated.
Inside the archive vitrine are 1940s stills from films by the US War Department and a 1943 US War Department brochure warning against venereal disease; film stills from the Walt Disney film VD Attack, 1950s-1970s newspaper clippings from Korean Newspapers about the US military camptowns, and a 213 pages compendium of meeting minutes between the US military and the South Korean Government. The documents served as evidence in a recent compensation lawsuit against the South Korean government, which was filed by women who had served in the camptowns while a group of 30 lawyers provided legal representation pro bono. The lawsuit was the result of a decade-long collaborative effort by the women involved, as well as various grassroots organizations, scholars, and activists.
Since the South Korean government has not released documentation about the STD facilities, these meeting minutes between The Joint Committee Under the Republic of Korea and the United States of Forces Agreement, served as crucial evidence of how the two governments worked together in controlling and maintaining the bodies and lives of women in the military camptowns, among others by forcibly detaining women at STD treatment facilities in order to prevent the spread of STD among US servicemen stationed in Korea.
Acknowledgments
Commissioned by Yongwoo Lee and Regina Shin for Buk Seoul Museum of Art
Support from the Danish Arts Foundation
Cinematography: Guston Sondin-Kung / Jane Jin Kaisen
Performers: Halmae and Mishin
Map drawing: CS
Organisational support: Durebang
Translation and research assistance: Hayeon Heather Kim
Research assistance: Haeseo Kim
Research exchange: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs