On the Hour / Hayoun Kwon

November 1–December 29, 2017

Commissioned for BAMPFA’s outdoor screen, Kwon’s imaginative digital animation evokes a woman who transformed her apartment into an aviary.

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Hayoun Kwon: still from I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings, 2017; digital video; color, silent; 5 min.; image courtesy of the artist.

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Events

Past Films

Hayoun Kwon’s Virtual Reality Projects
Sunday, November 12 4:30 PM
Kwon presents her recent virtual reality projects (related to her acclaimed video pieces), including 489 Years, set in the DMZ between North and South Korea, and The Bird Lady, on a woman who transformed her apartment into an aviary.
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The Short Films of Hayoun Kwon
Wednesday, November 15 7 PM
The artist joins us to present five of her short films using animation and new technologies that reflect on historical truth and personal meaning, whether in the Korean DMZ or modern France.
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On the Hour / Hayoun Kwon

I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings

November 1–December 29, 2017

Hayoun Kwon’s imaginative and immersive new digital animation, I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings, is the second program in On the Hour, which features moving-image works commissioned for BAMPFA’s outdoor screen. The short video is related to Kwon’s new virtual reality piece, The Bird Lady. Both center on a story that Kwon’s teacher Daniel Nadaud told her while she was a student in Nantes, France. “It was like a gift, a common space that we can share . . . this experience lived by a woman he met in 1967. . . . In the middle of Paris, without the slightest concern for her neighbors, she had transformed her apartment into a veritable aviary,” Kwon says. For her, The Bird Lady and I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings are not far apart from earlier documentary animations such as 489 Years, based on interviews with a South Korean soldier, or Lack of Evidence, drawing on the testimony of a Nigerian asylum seeker in France. “When I was working on more ‘political’ realities, what interested me, what I was trying to achieve most of all, was the ‘unreality’ of certain landscapes described in the stories of real characters. . . . What I wanted to portray through these personal stories was the moment when reality seemed to tip over into fiction for them. In this sense, the story Daniel told me is not so far from these personal stories. I wouldn’t have kept them to myself for so long if they had not carried me away.”

Kwon will present and discuss her digital and virtual reality works, including The Bird Lady, 489 Years, Lack of Evidence, and more, at two programs in the Barbro Osher Theater in November.

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On the Hour / Hayoun Kwon: I Suddenly Hear the Flap of Wings is organized by Film Curator Kathy Geritz. The project is made possible with the support of the INSTITUT FRANÇAIS in Paris.

Quotations from Kwon in the text above are from an interview by Jean-Christophe Royoux on the occasion of the exhibition L’oiseleuse at the Palais de Tokyo in 2017.

Supporter

Courtesy Institut Français, thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy

On the Hour / Hayoun Kwon

November 1–December 29, 2017

Past Films

Hayoun Kwon’s Virtual Reality Projects

The Short Films of Hayoun Kwon