Isolated from the world community and isolating itself from the world, North Korea is under the maximum threat of "total destruction" threatened by Donald Trump before the assembled UN global community. On the other side Kim Jong Un celebrates "the exciting sound of the explosion of our first hydrogen bomb" (original quote).
This North Korean rocket cult can be found all over the country, as Georg Klein noted on his trip with his fellow artist Bernhard Draz through North Korea in September 2017 (when Trump's speech was given at exactly that time) and looks like a dance on the volcano.
The propagandistic staging of one's own strength and discipline, however, contrasts with the peculiar, almost melancholic standstill that characterizes the atmosphere in this country. A strange calm that is both disturbing and fascinating.
With his installation Klein delivers a personal travelogue from audio, photos, blog-like video material and brought objects from North Korea, staged in a pentagonal, isolated chamber. The extreme tension that lay above this journey was not only incorporated in the "souvenirs" presented in a light, sound and video dramaturgy in the space, but also in a composition for the Korean national instrument Gayageum, the forms the subterranean soundtrack.
The focus is on a song that Klein was fortunate enough to pick up in the "flower exhibition" in Pyongyang: during the guided tour of the exhibition of two flowers - hundreds of copies of "Kimilsungia" (orchid) and "Kimjongilia" (Begonia) - was also included a sheet of music to discover: a song on the Kimilsungia and thus on the North Korean founder of the state. Klein asked the guide - a traditional North Korean girl - to sing the song for a recording. Back in Berlin, Klein composed the song together with a South Korean Gayageum player, who for the first time entered into a musical discourse with a "sister" from North Korea.
Loop: 16 min. Language: German / Korean, English subtitles
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| The Sound before Silence Souvenirs from North Korea 2018 Installation: pentagonal chamber with Objects, 2-channel-video and 6-channel-audio Gayageum: You Jin Sung (South Korea) Voice: N.N. (North Korea) |
