Sojin Gwak

Sojin Gwak graduated from the Department of Filmmaking from the School of Film, TV&Multimedia at the Korea National University of Arts, and works as a writer and video technician. Her representative directing work is <I sometimes dream of you when my body flickers> (Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, Seoul, 2014), (Theatre de la Ville, Paris, 2016 DANSE ENLARGIE), (No Color exhibition, Seoul, 2020). She participated as a director of photography in the works that received the BIFF Mecenat Award at the 23rd Busan International Film Festival, Bright Future Award at the 17th EBS International Documentary Festival and Excellence Award at the 20th Persons with Disabilities Film Festival, and was selected in the project lab at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival. She is currently a member of <ISA Studio> 1st residency team (KULA!) at Insa Art Space in 2020.

《Black Bird Black》

“Black gets more distinct in cities with blackbirds. The presence of black diversifies blackbirds."

It is said that media expands human perceptivity. Is it really so? Black Bird Black started from an image of a flock of crows taken in Gyeonggi Province in 2019. Due to climate change, there was a steep increase in the number of crows in the heart of downtown. Sojin Gwak focused on the fact that crows are not seen in the night videos of the city. Crows disappear into the identical gradation of the night sky and only the “black” appears. In this video, only when doubting the gradation of the digital image carrying the cityscape and getting through, our eyes can see the crows and the black as a whole finally. In this work, Sojin Gwak looks into the black from the perspective of “technicity” in terms of video filming and image production. She studied the conditions that make the black the black and the blackbirds the blackbirds, and intended to face the paradox of media technology that reproduces the black color, but at the same time make it emptier.

“Black Bird Black” (Soyoung Jeong, Seonwoo Choi, Jiji Lim, Dongho Kang, Yooni Ham, 2020), a novel with the same title, tried to bypass and understand the materiality of the “black” through fictional imagination. While the novel expands the relationship between the black and the blackbirds to the metaphorical dimension of literary works, Gawk’s work directly faces the characteristics of the medium. It closely mixes the meaning and the form of the black through the digital video in which the shape of the bird is standing out from the black sky by controlling the monitor display resolution, data graphic documenting the number of birds in a flock of crows, and the sound work and installation that coded the gradation in the black-and-white film.