Catriona Jeffries

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 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), and 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), and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

Documentation by Document Original.