Exhibition Information

(출처= CICA)

(출처= CICA)

			<Safe Search> deals with an artistic attempt to imagine my own subjecthood even for a moment instead of becoming numb or resigning when I feel powerless with anxiety due to safety issues surrounding women.

The quiet air I enjoy alone deep in the night is the greatest anxiety my mother imagine. Concerned about her daughter’s safety, my mom always gave me lessons about how to behave, and those lessons have seeped deep into my skin. I thought that the way I am prone to feeling anxious and being careful ahead of time and my habit of keeping an eye on how I behave were defensive techniques for myself. However, the legacy of anxiety carried over from my mother to me is selectively passed down. When I install anxiety and fear as a gear to protect myself, I am always tense, vigilant, and limit my area of activity to a safe zone. Even though I was fatigued by these defense strategies, I thought there was nothing more I could do.

The title of this exhibition is refered to the Google image search function called ‘SafeSearch’ which is an automated filtering function that prevents users from viewing pornography and offensive content. ‘Safe Search’ is activated also in my everyday life. In order to block from my life the images of unstable women or the women who died mysteriously in thriller movies and the news reports of violence that fill up the daily news feed, I intuitively learn when to feel fear, to be on the lookout, and to be careful by myself and avoid harmful things. However, this safe image retrieval technology determines what is safe on behalf of the user and blocks harmful images based on accumulated data, it makes me feel powerless in that users are only able to accept the result.

This is why the works in the exhibition ‘Safe Search’ explore situations that arouse fear and experiences that have become familiar as if they are mine, instead of avoiding it. By making “safety sensor” more sensitive, going off all the time, and wearing this heavy equipment as my expanded skin, I’m trying to find the boundaries between safe and unsafe women. This is an attempt to uncover the anxiety and fear that become more powerful when truth cannot be grasped. The space in the screen, which is reconstructed from filming with a camera, becomes an expanded skin, a psychological space, and a place for the eyes and ears to re-sense the outside of the frame. The episodes in which the sense of reality and the sense of hyper-reality overlap each other visualize my old lingering inherent imaginations that I don’t want to admit but actually spring up in my life. In this way, I bring out the senses that are common but I would rather not become accustomed to in order to question the convenient ways women’s anxiety is covered.

YOON Solin, who is a multimedia artist, explores the possibility of imagination amplified when she pass through the contemporary visual field with a feminist perspectives. She currently living and working in Seoul, South Korea. She got a recipient of the Artist Grant of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture(2021) and was selected an artist of 2020 Homesession Artspace & Artist in residence Barcelona Residency in Spain. She won an Arts Council Korea INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE Award, and got a recipient of the Emerging Artist Grant of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture(2015). She has held solo exhibitions such as in-Appropriate Pictures(2015) at Seoul Art Space Seogyo and Images, that, wonder (2015) at Woosukhall, Seoul. She has been featured in various group exhibitions at art spaces such as Openbox, Seoul, Seoul Art Space Seogyo, Seoul, Large Animal Experiment Building 3rd Floor at Suwon-gu Seoho-ro 89, Suwon, and Seoungbuk Museum of Art, Seoul. Also, she is one of the four directors of <Screening Project: Dongshisangyoung> from 2015 and have organized a series of video exhibitions presenting Korean artists and abroad artists by holding 17 screening exhibitions. She received a BFA from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, in Fine Arts and Art History, and holds a MFA in Seoul National University, Seoul, in Fine Arts.