If You Grind The Threshold of Three Other Houses: 한방글 Bang Geul Han

About

Working across a diverse array of media forms and processes, from weaving to artificial intelligence, Han critically engages with shifting understandings of public and private territories in relation to language, gender and body. Through playful and jarring juxtapositions and layering, Han creates material manifestations of the reverberating desires and libidinal investments at work within the legal documents, government memoranda, and written and spoken words of figures in positions of power, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and Congressman Henry J. Hyde. Originating from a 15th century Korean superstition believed to induce an abortion, the exhibition title frames Han’s practice as a series of ritualized acts that grind and chip away at the metaphorical thresholds guarding asymmetric social and political power structures. Complementing works in sculpture, textile, and generative video, the exhibition also includes TalkMeTender.life, an online artificial intelligence chatbot developed in collaboration with London-based artist Minna Pöllänen. Trained on feminist texts concerning themes of care and mortality the chatbot provides a counterpoint to the exhibition’s probing of biopolitical frameworks, by looking at vulnerability and difference as sites of care and possibility rather than exploitation and subjugation.