Bouquets [events]
Total Station, performance by Youngsook Choi at Mimosa House, Saturday 11 November 2023, 5pm
Youngsook Choi's performance, Total Station, invites the audience to hold the space for grief over losses by separation and hierarchy derived from colonial science around nature and life forms. Posing Western knowledge production as dominance-oriented ideologies and weaving through the speculative narratives of the elephant named Larut, this performance recalls, sits with and listens to the spirits merely reduced to ghostly numbers of theodolite survey in neo/colonial structure. Total Station attempts a spiritual upholding for interrogating the full circle of violence of extractive systems and conjuring up the interspecies healing moments of imagining otherwise.
Youngsook Choi is an artist/researcher trained in human geography. Under the umbrella theme of political spirituality, her performances and multi-faceted installations explore intimate aesthetics of solidarity building and collective healing. Grief has been the focus of Youngsook's recent practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy upon certain types of death and environmental destruction. Not This Future (2020), commemorating the Essex 39 incident rooted in the Formosa Disaster; Book of Loss (2022), intervention performance grieving seven lost glaciers; In Every Bite of the Emperor (2021-ongoing/long-term), the transnational weaving of neo-colonial narratives around damaged ecosystems are in tandem with this inquiry.
Various institutions have supported Youngsook's works. Amongst them are Arts Catalyst, Asia-Art-Activism, Barbican Centre, Camden Arts Centre, Coventry Biennial 2021, Estuary Festival, FACT Liverpool, Flat Time House, GOSH Arts, Heart of Glass, Liverpool Biennial 2021, Nottingham Contemporary, Up Projects in the UK; ARKO Art Center, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2023, Seoul Museum of Art in Korea; Documenta 15, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Germany; Gerimis in Malaysia; and Nextdoor ARI in Australia.