Judy Radul
Warmer Than The World Around Us

From February 9 to April 8, 2023
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, on 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 Gwangju Theatre, a cinema, as a site of production. 

Challenging the concept of visual perception as both a technological and biological experience, Radul uses thermal video cameras to film the musicians. With this alternative form of time-space capture, images read heat 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.

Judy Radul thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Gwangju Biennale for their support, as well as Alex Turgeon for his collaboration.

Judy Radul is an internationally acclaimed Canadian artist whose ambitious and elaborate works are concerned with forms of media occupying an expanded field of sculpture, cinema, video, robotics, theatrical installation, and performance. Radul was born in Lillooet, British Columbia, and currently resides between Vancouver on the territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwú7mesh and Musqueam peoples, and Berlin (Germany). She received an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (New York), and a BFA from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) where she serves as a professor. Recent solo exhibitions include Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2018), V-A-C Foundation at the GULAG History Museum (Moscow, 2017), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, 2017), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, 2015), Daadgalerie (Berlin, 2013). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and biennales including the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021), Albertinum (Dresden, 2019), Contour Biennale 8 (Mechelen, 2017), X Bienal de Nicaragua (2016), the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

Gina Hwang performs and writes creative, experimental sound works for the geomungo. She creates modern and sensuous intense music based on her unique sound and looping technique and experiments across the boundaries of genres and traditions, incorporating elements of traditional Korean music, rock, jazz, and electronic techniques. Since her debut as a soloist in 2017, she has presented widely in Korea and internationally. In 2022 Gina Hwang released her second album Short Film, available on Bandcamp, on which she collaborated on composing, arranging, and producing. Vividly conveying the unique scenery and stories of each song, she unfolds a new area of solo geomungo.

Hannah Kim is a Korean traditional percussionist and an improviser based in Seoul and Sydney. She has collaborated with contemporary dancers, classical, and free jazz based musicians. Also, she performed in openings at Seoul Museum of Art, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Barakat Contemporary. Hannah is currently undertaking training for ‘Jongmyo Jeryeak’, part of the intangible heritage of Korea. 

“While the conversation seems topical at first, touching on music and films, it soon becomes more philosophical.  The narration evolves into a rich metaphysical exploration of energy as a temporary trace of presence and contact, but also of the trace as an imitation of the object. Energy’s flow, circulating during contact, becomes the sole constant link between corporality and materiality. When contact is broken, this flow is lost. Such thoughts, expressed in a poetically and pictorially, accompanied by the haunting traditional music, create an atmosphere of contemplative trance.”

— Marie Lansiaux

↘︎ Full text, written for the Atelier de critique course (UQÀM) (in French)
(our translation)