Title Match is an annual exhibition organized by the SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art. Celebrating its ninth rendition, this year’s Title Match invites IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast who work both as visual artists and filmmakers, presenting the essence of their artistic worlds of wide-ranging themes and artistic forms.

The thirteen artworks that consist of the 2022 Title Match exhibition tell us the stories at different paces. Instead of surveying the diverse works of IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast, the exhibition focuses on presenting the two artists’ most recent works that show the essence of the worlds they create. Such an approach will provide an opportunity to fully appreciate the moments at which the artists’ unique languages reach their peak to produce fruitful results. In addition, IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast premiere their new works in this exhibition, which are respectively titled The Waves and Garage Sale. These two works incorporate intimate and meta-elements in terms of framework, composition, content, and narrative technique. On the multi-channel screens, they unfold conceptual and complex thinking to explore the origin of the self and the world.

The focus of the current exhibition with regards to the encounter between IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast is what the worlds that the two artists respectively depict embody. In their work, the aspects of life are unfolded on the screen as memories, the past, and history persist in time and develop in complex ways. What they pursue then is to affirm the world as it is and look into the journey of the beings living within it. There, a creative will is inherent in the belief in the world of the present, not of another one, which is to constantly reconstruct the “world that remains to come even after it has been lost.” Combined with such an artistic will, the way the two artists compose the format of their work and interpret their medium endows a strong political character to their works. IM Heung-soon’s work maximizes the emotional aspects of the scene through sound, which functions as a dispositif of affect. The inevitability and impossibility are displayed at once by the installation of the screens inviting the audience to move in the space. In addition, through his collaborative works, IM examines the possibility of a political community. All of these ultimately emphasizes the ethics of the other and poetic hospitality. Based on film, Omer Fast’s work crosses different genres, such as photography and painting. His work creates a dense cinematic space through the intense encounter between diverse techniques ranging from 3D to motion capture and how the subject matter is presented. These reinforce the aesthetic politicity of his work. As such, the works of IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast survey the mediatic characteristics of video and realize a vast aesthetic project that explores the possibility of an ethical subject from the ongoings of the times and individuals.

“Cut!”, the exclamation at the end of the long title of an annual exhibition, is a shout to signify the “OK” sign by a film director. It also signifies a grammatical principle that is unique to the medium of video and serves as a metaphor for editing techniques. The very scenes, created through countless shooting and editing to create a world, are ultimately a “series of cut images.” 2022 Title Match: IM Heung-soon vs. Omer Fast “Cut!” inherits the name of “Title Match.” And it also stands at a point on which it functions as a seam connecting the tradition and passes on its legacy by becoming part of the ongoing tradition of the annual exhibition. As such, it becomes a scene by itself as an image that distinguishes itself and connects different things at the same time. The audience is invited to become images that fill different scenes within the worlds depicted by the two artists’ works and the stories told by the characters on the screen. In doing so, the exhibition also imagines the audience becoming part of a circular structure without a beginning and an end. Just like the threads that are connected to each other, a scene in the exhibition comes to us as a story that is unwound and wound on another scene. It then becomes many possibilities that change our lives, transferred from within us onto the screen. As a result, the 2022 Title Match: IM Heung-soon vs. Omer Fast “Cut!” will generate a deep resonance through the overlap of two worlds, which ultimately point to the same place amid differences in subject, point of view, and language.

Image: Omer Fast, Garage Sale, 2022 ⓒ Omer Fast (Photo by Lukas Strebel)