Opening on February 9 at 6 pm

Warmer Than The World Around Us, by Canadian artist Judy Radul, was originally produced onsite in Gwangju, South Korea, for the occasion of the 13th Gwangju Biennale. Working in close collaboration with musicians Gina Hwang, who plays the geomungo (a Korean six-string instrument), and Hannah Kim on the gong and janggu drum, the artist activates the historic GwanJu Theatre, now a cinema, as a site of production. 

Challenging the concept of visual perception as both a technological and biological experience, Radul films the musicians using thermal video cameras. With this alternative form of time-space capture, images read energy instead of light, thereby calling into question the causality between recorded movement and the understanding then perpetuated. Sound’s immateriality is made tangible by focusing on the physical origin of sound: the body activating the instrument as both a producer and conductor in energy exchange. 

Radul’s audio-visual installation, consisting of a main film accompanied by four satellite channels, connects the masterful yet intuitive playing of the traditional instruments to a range of perceptual cross-infusions where color, timbre, waves and vibrations co-constitute each other. Warmth, in particular, takes on meaning not only as that which the camera records but by extension in its relationship to contact — between bodies, between the body and instruments, between space and event. Interestingly, the film’s dialogue delivers the perspectives, not only of the musicians who name their expanded observations, but also those of the camera and the cinema who impart their contemplations around memory and states of the mind.