Sinae Yoo, Guilt Trip, installation view, 2017

https://youtu.be/EK-hoCUqpZA
Dancing Eyes 1, 2017. HD video with sound 4’46

Dancing Eyes 2, 2017. HD video with sound 3’42

Neumeister Bar-Am presents Sinae Yoo’s first solo exhibition in Germany: Guilt Trip. Yoo’s practice encompasses multiple media. ‘Dancing Eyes’ is a single installation made of two video works, accompanied by a series of paintings on paper.

The first video captures dancers and performers hired to celebrate the opening of stores in public shopping districts in Seoul, and the light displays of illegal party buses that prey on a lonely, elderly audience. Exhibited on an oversized intercom interface, these images of gyrating dancers and fatigued mascots on break, place the viewer in the morally awkward position of monitoring from afar these faceless bodies, as they hover between exhaustion and spectacle.

The second video, shown on a monitor, intercuts images of still convulsing dead animals about to be turned into food-stuff, with scenes from ‘Dancing Eyes’, a 1996 arcade game from which the installation derives its title, which show the undressing of crudely rendered woman by way of game-play. The sickening sense of dread that permeates these garishly-colored hyper-commodified bodies, neither dead nor alive, is further reinforced by the score, which Yoo composed in collaboration with American sound artist Sentinel.

Rather than placing herself in a ‘critical’, moralizing position, Yoo’s work grapples openly with its morbid fascinations, weighing her own capacity to fabricate aesthetic distance, to derive pleasure from the commodification of her subject’s vitality, with a melancholic search for empathy.
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Text by Ché Zara Blomfield

Thanks to the support of sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern (CH)
This project has received support from the City of Bern and SWISSLOS Kultur Kanton Bern