Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Reiterations of Dissent concerns the suppressed history and fragmented memories of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre, which took place shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War on the filmmaker´s birthplace, Jeju Island, South Korea. In a ‘red hunt’ the Korean military and police, under supreme command of the U.S. Military, committed genocide onto the civilian population. For more than five decades, it was prohibited to talk about the event. Composed of six different video narratives – Ghosts, Jeju Airport Massacre, Lamentation of the Dead, The Politics of Naming, Retake: Mayday and History of Endless Rebellion – Reiterations of Dissent uncovers the underlying political motivations and portrays how the un-reconciled trauma of Jeju 4.3 resonates in the natural landscape, in literature, in memories of survivors and relatives, in shamanic rituals mediating between the living and the dead, and in protests against the ongoing construction of the Jeju Naval Base. Using various audiovisual registers and editing techniques, Reiterations of Dissent explores a new language for documentary filmmaking and challenges relationships between text, image and narrative. Each video shows a different aspect of the Jeju 4.3 as an unstable episode of modern history by presenting a multi-layered archive of experiences, events and perspectives.

Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where she is currently doing an artistic research PhD. Being invested in questions of memory, history and subjectivity, Kaisen’s work deals with transnational political histories that have been silenced or banned but that resonate in the present moment through a sense of haunting. Recent narrative experimental films include Reiterations of Dissent (2014) concerning the suppressed history and fragmented memories of the Jeju April Third Uprising and Massacre, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010) that explores how mechanisms of militarism, patriarchy, colonialism and nationalism effected three generations of women in Korea. Kaisen has presented her films and video installations at various art museums and film festivals internationally, including Videonale, Seoul International New Media Festival, the Liverpool Biennial, the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, Korean American Film Festival New York, Fokus Video Art Festival, Kunsthallen Brandts, Gana Art New York, Jeju International Womens Film Festival and Asian Womens Film Festival Berlin.