※ Because the Story Is Not the Same_Brochure

※ Because the Story Is Not the Same_screening schdule

MMCA Film and Video presents a screening program with single channel works of Walid Raad, Ho Tzu Nyen, Hayoun Kwon, and Zachery Formwalt who are the participating artists of the exhibition The Principle of Uncertainty. This program introduces the moving image works of four artists who have been unfolding ongoing projects based on their consistent research about specific time, geographical and phenomenological approach. These moving image works, with its profoundly allegorical approach in diverse themes and methodologies, address together in reconstructing the hidden stories between personal memory and public history.

In the preface of the collection of short stories titled A Universal History of Infamy, Argentina's distinguished writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote as follows: "I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks." When the final phase of the moving image's narrativity surpassed contemplation of the reality, we reached a point where we can no longer tell what actually took place or who the artist behind the story is. It is fair to say that the four films by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, who founded a fictional archive 'The Atlas Group', are realizations of the Baroque aesthetic that Borges has mentioned. Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31)(2001) and The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs(1999) in particular seem to write a different history by combining reality and fiction. The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs puts together the story of Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a fictitious character who is a well-known historian with an expertise in Lebanon War, along with footages of Corniche beach promenade in Beirut where Lebanese security agency has installed surveillance cameras, and text. These elements points to a historical fact that is far more complex and fictitious than a simple truth about a particular person or an event. Thus, the cause of the event is far lost, nowhere to be found within the passage of time. The works of Walid Raad reveal themselves as a huge joke that contradicts the conventional idea of history as well as the existence of the artist as the main agent of the work.

Ho Tzu Nyen from Singapore presents films that portray phenomena disparate from the world of image and sound to which we are familiar. Elements such as unidentifiable white vapor that surrounds the male bodies large enough to deliver the sense of their massive weight from The Cloud of Unknowing(2011), the minute sounds that occupy the enclosed space where a group of dying people are leaving the materiality of the body from Earth(2009-2012) narrate a kind of idea or being that roam around our world like ghosts or specters. Footages works that follow such as The Name(2015) and The Nameless(2015) tell the stories of invisible beings who have been obscured or alienated through mysterious narratives of real people who played a prominent role at a time when history of the Malaya Communist Party and that of the foundation of Singapore cross over. Here, the only feature film of Ho Tzu Nyen and the nominee of Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight, leads the audience to observe the character who gets incarcerated in a mental health facility for killing his wife for unknown reasons as well as other accommodated patients' abnormal behavior. Ho Tzu Nyen's films incorporate various texts such as fairy tales from the 19th century, Singapore's founding myth, paintings by classical European painters, and the rock band Queen's songs to realize the world of allegories.

Hayoun Kwon is a Korean artist who has produced a series of films that reconstruct a surreal space based on existing places such as Panmunjeom and demilitarized zone that symbolize the history and reality of division of Korea, or real stories like the one of a Nigerian boy who escaped his country. The following works will be presented in 2D theatre version: 489 Years, a VR film based on DMZ; Model Village(2014) that shows a blueprint of a fictitious city inspired by the North Korean propaganda village of Kijong-dong; Lack of Evidence(2011), an animated film that restructures the moment of the past when a Nigerian refugee in France escaped death in his childhood. An experimental animated documentary that tells the story of a Nigerian boy's journey of escape Lack of Evidence and an imaginative representation of a North Korean habitation Model Village both create imaginary spaces with drawing techniques or miniatures in transparent acrylic. Also, 489 Years converted the actual image with a 3D graphic software. Three films of Hayoun Kwon describe a particular space and time narrated through others' memories as if they are islands that float around separately in the hollow universe. The audience is led to listen to the stories of the space from the others' memories that are reconstructed by the artist's imagination.

Zachery Forwalt is an American artist based in Netherlands. He has focused on analyzing images through the history of capital and the traces in photographed space before the invention of cinema. At Face Value(2008) analyzes the stamp images with overprints of modified prices according to the changes in their values while In Place of Capital(2009) explores the landscape photographs of the Royal Exchange in London, an architecture symbolic of the history of capital. Unsupported Transit(2011) paradoxically connects a construction site in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs that are produced upon a request of a capitalist to capture a galloping horse's feet afloat. As such, Zachery Formwalt examines the correlation of Karl Marx's Capital and image with consistency. Such an attempt testifies that the remaining images within a space with the reality's movements long gone are the invisible traces of the mobility of capital.

Because the Story Is Not the Same presents four artists' films denies the totality of history while leaving us with a suspicious that the substance of reality itself is already fabricated from the very beginning through approaches such as deconstructing and transforming, restructuring and analyzing.