Sylbee Kim’s video installation featuring three works, A Sexagesimal Love Letter, A Little Warm Death, and Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe, is a fake praise for the capitalistic supremacies in disguise of religion. The work is conceived as a method to survive the current political, economical and technological conditions, which are becoming increasingly accelerated in unprecedented ways. It aims for a fearless perception of death, to reevaluate the life in our age of carefree, post-capitalistic devastation. The three work elements are produced using archive material as well as copyright-free images from web.
Ancient sexagesimal system was a frame to understand the universe, and it is still contained in our measurement of time. Structured by 59 numbers, A Sexagesimal Love Letter is conceived as a kind of digital codex that reminds of public ads or Internet memes around the formation of body as a sociopolitical universe. Each transition of the 59 clauses is marked by a digital signal with a distorted scale and morph into a monologue or declaration of love. A Little Warm Death is a memento mori put together with images of animal flesh and bodily organs instead of a skull. Placed obliquely between A Sexagesimal Love Letter (‘the codex’) and Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe (‘the real world’) while intruding on the latter, the work mimics the iconology of a Buddhist mandala. In Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe two figures appear immersed in a mysterious ritual around life and death in an urban environment. Their bodies become a negative space for different histories as well as ideas of a possible future. They represent all beings in struggle for life under lethal conditions of wars that sustain plutocracy. On the other hand, the unchoreographed moment of a dialogue is inserted and exposes the actual reality that interferes with the overall structure of the installation.
