Reality has sprung, and it is rife with problems. Sanguine spatters down into a thick puddle. The bleeding is much heavier than expected. Something is bleeding, bleeding, bleeding. So it continues, with the shrieking and squealing of final throes; an animal is being put down, or rather, getting stuck with an industrial grinder. It was found unfit, sick, and hopeless; only a mild cold, but colds are for people. Healing and recovery are also for people. A prescription or a cure is out of the question for pigs. And just like that, the pig was determined to be a disease-ridden liability in the pen. It had to go. Had it been disease-free and lived its full term, it would have ended up on the dining table. To put simply, the pig was destined to die the moment it was determined to be harmful for human consumption. And that determination hinged on a swineherd's imagined potential of contagion and mass loss. The ability to envision future outcomes gives power over those without that ability. With enough potential futures imagined, it becomes indistinguishable to holding the keys to the future. This is problematic. The keyholder's monopoly over the future, the crimson pool on the ground, reality is just a sequence of one problem after another.
Circus is the story of a man who is a troupe leader running a circus show. As the owner and leader, he is the master of ceremonies, the ring master, and has creative control over shows. He even takes the stage as a clown if he is not emceeing events. Here, he moves about between the eight monitors for 20 minutes, introducing an octet of freaks. This freak show resembles the 17th and 18th century circuses that devolved into freak show tents. A freak show is an exhibition of biological rarities, of persons and animals. Sometimes the exceptional aspect was of appearance (congenital deformities, rare conditions, or altered appearances). At other times, the exceptionality was that of performance, such strange feats and rare displays such as acrobatics. Freaks in Circus display extraordinary performances, presented for their extraordinary situations, rather than the grotesque and shocking physical appearances of yesteryear. The ringmaster introduces to us eight freak situations and persons across eight locations: a person who culls pigs, a person who teaches a parrot to repeat profanities, a person who attacks a politician, an executioner who uses nitrogen gas, a family that simply looks strange, a person who vandalises national treasures, a 'weather fairy' that appears every day, and a person who falls from the sky. The ringmaster ports across eight locations to exhibit the eight strange people and their freakish situations to the (circus) crowd.
In the exhibition hall are a collection of sculptures; anachronistic objects that mimic a sort of history, despite being objects from the present. These sculptures are presented like archaeological artefacts in a museum, but the only 'past' they really have are their appearance in the freak-show circus videos running on the monitors. The circus tent is striped in the typical and eye-catching red and white. Eight objects are present, each with a distinct sculptural grammar, each one representing one of the freakish situations on-screen. The circus tent and the other objects take on a type of anachronism, with a faux-classic or fake-retro type of appearance. What these sculptures ultimately do is echo contemporary events that are nothing short of freakish. The typical red-and-white striped circus tent is in fact, a cheap children's play tent purchasable at IKEA. The radial stripes also resemble the large beach-umbrella type folding-table-fixtures commonly seen outside convenience stores in Korea. The eight freak-sculptures, including the person holding a piggy bank, a nitrogen-filled balloon, and the penguin perched on a bungee line all appear to be suspended in time. That is, by feigning an exhaustion of time in the way that archaeological objects remain at an indefinite epilogue beyond their given time, these sculptures dig up the freak show that is unfolding all around us.
What do the eight oddities of Circus say about our reality? For that, the history and definition of freak show sheds some light. Traced back to popularity in the 16th to 18th centuries, these shows gradually went away for being distasteful in their treatment of people, even becoming outlawed in places. To a degree, it may have come from the recognition that humanity existed beyond what met the eye. Yet as we are presently aware, are those shows truly gone? A closer inspection of the ringmaster's grotesque situations show that they are very recent; present, even. Some happened only this year, early 2024 or in the months immediately prior. The assassination attempt on Democratic Party leader Jae-myung Lee, the outer wall of Gyeongbokgung Palace vandalised with aerosol paint demarking an illegal website, nitrogen hypoxia execution in Alabama on the day that most of us were watching an Asian Cup soccer match, and the animal cruelty of the human rights group protesting said execution. These were all occurrences that deviate from where modern sensibilities or a modern moral compass might hope for us to be, but those expectations of shared humanity and greater philanthropy are shattered and thrown in the face of turbulent reality.
There is a shared element in all freak shows that we overlook. Haunted house mirrors do a great job of surfacing that element: the audience themselves, peeping and gazing with voyeuristic glee. The concept of "linear development" is dubious, at any point in history. Any point of status in the past's economy, ethics, or sociocultural development compared to today's may be arbitrarily drawn as a line, but that is a low-definition map, and hardly the actual territory of landslide drops and downward-diving parabolas. Linear is misleading. In retrospect, social advancement of any society is determined by the society's own deeds, not its status on a historical line-graph. Furthermore, there never has been a perfect society in that regard. And in that imperfect society of mal-adjusted individuals and misaligned moral compasses, there will always be grotesque happenings. We no longer see pamphlets or posters that promote the genre of exhibitions, but we witness freakish and grotesque happenings around us daily. The eight exhibits of Circus are just that. An exhibit of exhibits, breaking the fourth wall across stage, anachronism, and eventually our suspension of disbelief.
Jinju Kim | GALLERY2
204, Pyeongchang-gil
Jongno-gu
Seoul, 03004
South Korea
www.gallery2.co.kr
+82 2 3448 2112
Tuesday – Saturday
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