Soojin Chang was one of the two recipients of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022. The project awarded them with £25,000 to develop their winning proposal and make the significant moving-image work BXBY.
The work was exhibited at Jerwood Space, London, 7 May - 23 July 2022.
For additional content including interviews, clips and exhibition images visit the FVU website
BXBY
Soojin Chang’s video BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, following Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. Drawing from chimeric figures within creation stories of the British Isles and the diasporic cultures of Chang and her collaborators (Choulay Mech, Jade O'belle, Anika Ahuja, and Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a Kasimyn), Chang positions their own hybrid body – part animal, part woman, part alien – as a site of technological interaction and as a locus of ongoing experiment. Sampling diverse scientific methods such as IVF, biohacking, and voluntary self-touch, BXBY addresses the legacy of colonial science to open out into wider affirmation of queer, interspecies kinship and reliance. From this position, BXBY aims to spur a purposeful discussion on notions of sacrifice, animality, objecthood and in/visibility; looking in particular to animist techniques of embodying and remembering.
Sacrifice to the Seaworm
Sacrifice to the Seaworm is a companion work to BXBY, which was made in response to the decision (made by Leeds Art Gallery in consultation with the artist and Jerwood Arts/FVU) to not present BXBY at the gallery, with the view that some of its content would be considered especially challenging for the high number of family audiences who visit the gallery.
The non-appearance of BXBY at Leeds Art Gallery opens up a space for a ritual act of repair that draws upon other instances of absence and loss and the consequent processing of pain and violence through the vehicle of sacrificial practices. The new body of work being shown at Leeds Art Gallery, Sacrifice to the Seaworm, formed collaboratively with Tenzin Mingyur Paldron (writer) and Jade O’Belle (artist), is a direct response to the decision not to show BXBY and features Paldron’s work on self-immolation and suffering, following a historic letter and parable shared by peace activist and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the actions of 170 Tibetans. The title of the piece refers both to the sea gods who launch the first birthing in BXBY and to the burial mound at the centre of this new installation. Created with specimens borrowed from the Natural Sciences Collections at Leeds Museums & Galleries, the offering imagines a meeting of death practices that honours our multispecies kinship and illuminates our multispecies fate.
Sacrifice to the Seaworm was exhibited at Leeds Art Gallery, 18 November 2022 - 22 January 2023. Exhibition images
BXBY (2022) was exhibited off-site at Project Space in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, hosted by the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE).
The Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 was a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Film and Video Umbrella, in partnership with Leeds Art Gallery.