다성적-다감각적 내러티브와 여성 주체들의 대항-역사쓰기: 임흥순의 〈좋은 빛, 좋은 공기〉 설치작품(2018)과 다큐멘터리 영화(2020)

Abstract

This study defines the trend of multi-screen video installation works since the 1990s as developing the ’polyphonic-multisensory narrative’, discussing works that Heung-soon Lim has produced through his artistic practice that crosses the border of documentary film and public art, the movie theater and the exhibition space, the single screen and multi-channel screens. Among them, it focuses on the meaning and form of the polyphonic-multisensory narrative of Good Light, Good Air in relation to female subjects’ writing of counter-history. The work’s installation version (2018) presents two urban spaces, Gwangju and Buenos Aires, which experienced similar historical trauma, side by side on two-channel screens. The work’s feature-length documentary film (2021) deepens key issues shared by the two cities, including missing people and the restoration of traumatized places, while also expanding the installation’s narrative space and time by foregrounding the exchange workshop between the two cities that involves future generations’ reenactments and VR experience aimed to raise what they can do from the ‘present’ perspective.<BR> This paper explores the expansive potentiality of the polyphonic-multisensory narrative of Good Light, Good Air, focusing on the following topics. First, as a strategy to approach the historical truth and make it present, it illuminates the viewer’s multi-layered, multisensory experience and the expansion of her memory through various media formats encompassing the two-channel installation work and the theatrical film. Second, it investigates the female subjects’ counter-history writing through their struggle and solidarity beyond Im’s previous works that relate ’women’s voices’ as personal microhistory to public history. Third, it also focuses on the ways that the work’s ‘reenactment’, Im’s main device for reaching empathy, appeals to the ‘presentness’ of the history, by investigating the reenactment of the girls. With these three topics, this paper argues that Im’s strategies of Good Light, Good Air, which includes his explorations into the different formats and spectatorial modes of standard film and exhibition into the issues of objectivity and subjectivity in dealing with history, and his placing of women’s testimonies and performances at the forefront of history, all leads to the polyphonic-multisensory narrative for understanding pains of others and promoting solidarity with them.