Ssitgim-Gut; Purification Rite was presented as part of the group exhibition (Ghost Funeral Service Co.), organized by the collective “Pamyo.” The exhibition critically examined conventional funeral practices in Korea, questioning the speed, structure, and conditions under which mourning is permitted, distributed, or foreclosed.

Drawing from ssitgim-gut, a Korean shamanic purification ritual traditionally performed to release the unresolved grief (han) of the dead, the performance repositions this practice within a contemporary context of ongoing disaster and collective trauma. Rather than treating han as a fixed or culturally bounded emotion, the work approaches it as a condition that emerges across different contexts—where grief, loss, and trauma remain internalized and unexpressed.

During the performance, the performer repeatedly washes a sugar body, dissolving it into water, and then drinks the liquid in which the residue accumulates. This cyclical gesture—“wash, drink, repeat”—transforms mourning into an embodied process, where the boundary between subject and object, self and other, becomes unstable. The act of ingestion suggests that grief is not a problem to be solved,  but a process to be taken in, metabolized, and lived through.

By engaging ritual as both method and structure, Ssitgim-Gut; Purification Rite  questions who is allowed to mourn, how mourning is performed, and what remains after formal rituals end. The work proposes that confronting internalized trauma may not resolve it, but can generate a body capable of responding to disaster.