Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Since the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, South Korean artists and exhibit makers have tapped into the power of art activism to support the Burmese struggle for democracy. This essay pays special attention to two of the earliest exhibitions held in Gwangju, a southwestern hub in the peninsula that since May 1980 has been widely been known as a site of civil resistance. With a focus on each show's narrative and audience engagement in relation to the historic meaning of Gwangju, this essay considers the limits of transnational solidarity imagined through art activism, revealing solidarities that reinforce either the nation-state as primary in defining political subjectivity or the universalist humanism at their core. Although these shows allow the empathic positioning of artists to a certain degree, their activism does not necessarily provide meaningful means of building south-south partnership.

This essay examines feminist curation as a work of care with the example of Purplay, a South Korean streaming service. In less than four years since its official launch, Purplay has grown into a platform that currently streams 330 films made by women, hosts a community of 30,000 subscribers, and produces new discourse on women's cinema through its various initiatives. I analyze an array of Purplay's curatorial practices as a feminist intervention that not only provides increased access to women's films but also forges a sense of community among the platform's participants. These practices, I argue, have constituted a sober reckoning with the inequitable dynamics that characterize South Korea's current social fabric, and are redefining its screen culture.

This dissertation offers a historical account of film preservation in South Korea, detailing how and why the idea of preserving film took hold, and how the process of decolonization complicated its practical realization. Drawing upon sources from archives, interviews, newspapers and published reports, it explores the conditions under which the archives of cinema evolved, and analyzes the conflicting ways that Japanese and American political authorities, Korean leaders, international policy makers, and Korean film industry members understood film's value and purpose. The political regimes that ruled over South Korea—both foreign and domestic—understood film to be both short-term entertainment and a didactic tool, and therefore were not concerned with the long-term storage of cinema. Meanwhile, local actors such as filmmakers and critics challenged the state's dominant perception of cinema. Their transnational encounters with film institutes, audiovisual education agencies, and film preservation movements around the world led to different and diverse understandings of the role and value of film. Despite this counter discourse, political regimes concentrated on the utility of cinema as part of the modernization of mutable subjects, instituting little rigor in local actors' film conservation activity until the early 1970s. What ended up dramatically shifting the country's attitudes towards and practices of film preservation was not a sustainable investment in film culture by the political regime, but instead competition with North Korea and the elevation of Korean cultural prestige as an economic force. These forces combined to lead to a reconsideration of film conservation and archival practices in South Korea.

In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema's futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema's public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as a political force. Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.