5 Minute Revolution Manifesto - 4pm Workshop and Performance

Sunday April 25, 2010

Nam June Paik Arts Centre 2F

4pm Workshop, 4.30pm Performance

Okin is a group of artists concerned with issues of spatial regeneration, intervention and collaboration. The name Okin references the famous Okin-Dong site redevelopment and the associated process of tearing down the existing buildings. Through their activities, the group excavates the complexities associated to conflicting temporalities, topologies and agendas. Okin’s first public event, Okin OPEN SITE precariously held at the demolition site itself, functioned to highlight the situation and the discrepancies between individual and corporate power. In addition, it had the added functionality of performing as a ‘conceptual wake’: the ability to recognize the importance of something, celebrate its existence, lament its disappearance and, in doing so, enact the ability to move on, not as an act of leaving behind, but of carrying forward.

Given the state many of the apartments were left in (several seeming to have been abandoned without a chance of salvaging possible objects of sentimental value) the Okin collective seems to have taken on this ritual that those displaced were unable to perform. This ‘operating in the absence of the other ‘(which is neither for nor on behalf of the other) raises relevant questions regarding notions of memory, interference and engagement, archiving, and interchangeability of experience while testing the value of artistic activity.

For the event they are conducting as part of the Inhabiting the Breach program activated by Tammy Kim’s 5 Interloc(k)utors, Okin continue their negotiation with space, transformation, presence and intervention by presenting themselves and their ongoing process as they publicly negotiate a manifesto. The ground for the 5 Minute Revolution Manifesto is to engage with artistic activity and spatial dynamics in a manner that becomes an interrogation of their own process as a group and rallies a cry that breaches the status quo. For their intervention, the group has produced a limited edition print to be transformed into a loudspeaker. The public would be given these for free to openly voice their opinion. The loudspeaker works as a physical boundary rider: it is both a record of an event, an interrogation device, a physical embodiment of a manifesto, the announcement of a revolution and a conceptual declaration of intent.

The construction of the loudspeaker with the public is to be accompanied by an open roundtable discussion about the history and critique of manifestos, the conceptual background of the Okin project, and an investigation into urban and institutional interventions that also addresses the group’s interaction with Tammy Kim’s installation in Conjunctures within the Breach. In parallel, a writing workshop will encourage the public to inscribe their own thoughts for a manifesto onto the loudspeakers they construct.

The entire process will culminate with the performance of the manifesto, to be staged outdoors on the top of the container structure adjacent to the art center’s cafeteria terrace.

Okin – Hwayong Kim, Shiu Jin, Jooyoung Lee, Yuk King Tan, Joungmin Yi

Flyer, Address, Map and Directions -
http://njp.kr/root/html_eng/event.asp?idx=66&gotopage=1