Dismemberment: Curating is Curing and Caring is Recurring

Screening of the film Dismemberment, followed by a conversation between mudang-artist* Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) and philosopher and curator Q (aka Kyoo Lee).

"The film installation Dismemberment by Sara Sejin Chang (on view at Kunstinstituut Melly, 20 September 2024–27 April 2025) stages an allegorical heterotopia where the white gallery space becomes a site of ancestral convergence and cosmic consultation. Here, even the foundational optimism of the European Enlightenment project, the optimized malady of racialized coloniality and patriarchy, can be cured, radically. On this alternatively animated, spirited site split into a screening room and a display room, we get to sight aestheticized ritual objects along with paintings of Korean shamanic gods and texts among other unnameables including an array of objects shown in the film, the extended ordinariness of which remains uncanny.

We shall, in turn, reflect on how spiritual and planetary healing practices, akin to curatorial activities, become key to the ongoing decolonial detox project, where undoing Eurocentric patriarchal whiteness involves saving Europa from herself who, she says, is sick."

*a mudang is Korean word/term for a shaman or spiritual medium