The Johns Hopkins University Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) Initiative has partnered with the Center for Advanced Media Studies to bring internationally-renowned artist Jane Jin Kaisen as artist-in-residence to Baltimore and feature her multi-media artwork at the SNF Parkway Theatre.
Experience Kaisen's installed artworks, Apertures/Specters/Rifts (2016) and Strange Meetings (2017) and reserve seats to screenings of two of her films,The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, (2010) and Community of Parting (2019) as part of the Asia North Arts Festival 2022.
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices speaking of histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints.
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted. Following a group of international adoptees and other women of the Korean diaspora in their 20s and 30s, the film uncovers how the return of the repressed confronts and destabilizes narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted onto the bodies and lives of women and children.
A genealogy is created by relating the stories of three generations of women: the former ‘comfort’ women who were subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and World War II – women who have worked as sex-workers around US military bases in South Korea since the 1950s to the present – and transnational adopted women from South Korea to the West since the Korean War.
Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, the filmic narrative unfolds in a non-chronologic and layered manner. By reinterpreting and juxtaposing historical archive footage with recorded documentary material and staged performative actions, multiple spaces and times are conjoined to contour how a nexus of militarism, patriarchy, racism and nationalism served to suppress and marginalize certain parts of the population and how this part of world history continues to reverberate in the present moment.
Photo by Daniel Zox
Jane Jin Kaisen (born in on the Jeju Island, South Korea) is a visual artist living in Copenhagen who works with video installation, experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text. Her artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. Her work is best known for its visually striking, performative, and feminist qualities in which past and present are brought into dialogue with each other. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, border theory, and translation, she activates the field where subjective experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Jin Kaisen will join the Center for Advanced Media Studies as well as the initiative on “Building Anti-Racist Coalitions and Intersectional Knowledge in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence” at Johns Hopkins for an artist residency in 2022.
Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) is a scholarly and community-oriented initiative to build anti-racist coalitions across Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore. It takes anti-Asian violence as a site where we can develop intersectional frameworks to engage the heterogeneous challenges facing Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities and interrogate the effects of white supremacy on academic knowledge produced about minoritized communities.
Asia North celebrates the arts and Asian culture that are defining characteristics of Baltimore’s Charles North neighborhood, part of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Inaugurated in spring 2019, Asia North is a collaborative community celebration that recognizes, showcases, and honors the art, culture and the Asian heritage of Greater Baltimore, especially the Korean history of Baltimore’s Charles North community. The Asian Arts & Culture Center co-produces events with the Central Baltimore Partnership, and multiple community partners. Area artists and organizations present exhibits, performances, films, and more. In spring 2020, the programs expanded to online formats.
COVID-19 Safety Note
As of Saturday, January 8, 2022, the SNF Parkway requires all participants to be fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine that is approved by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to attend screenings. Additionally, all patrons are required to wear masks when inside the SNF Parkway building. Patrons experiencing any COVID-19 symptoms are encouraged to stay home.