Unfortunately, or not
2021
mixed media installation

Installation exhibited in Koganecho Bazaar 2021

1st October 2021 | Yokohama, Japan



2020: When a pandemic kicked in …

I was undertaking a winter artist-in-residency program in a Swedish-speaking town in southwestern Finland in early 2020. By mid-March, coming towards the end of my 3-month residency, the EU border was closed due to the global coronavirus pandemic – all cross-border travel, even, within EU was basically banned, and yet I realized I was stranded in the best possible way – at an artist-in-residency in the countryside in Finland when the pandemic kicked in.

With a *super-8 camera that I borrowed from a local filmmaker since the beginning of my artist-in-residency, I’ve set the camera up on a tripod in my residency apartment, aiming to capture the white-out snowy landscape from the north-facing window in my living room during the Nordic winter days. Because of the pandemic, I got an unexpected extension transitioning into the Nordic spring.

*The super-8 camera I had in hand was a Canon-1014XL. I was much fascinated by its in-camera manual dissolve in/out function. The whole idea I had in mind was to place and fix the camera in one spot for an extended period of time so that I could capture how the view outside of my window changes from time to time, and later on, between seasons. As a soft reminder, the digitalized movie showing at the exhibition on the monitor is an entire cartridge reel of unedited super 8 film that is 15 meter in length. All on-screen dissolving in/out transitions were in-camera operations without further retouch.

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And when the pandemic continues in 2021…

Funny thing is, everyone kind of imagined/believed/anticipated/hoped that the pandemic would be over in summer 2020. And yet the pandemic is still up and running until this very moment in autumn 2021.

Here and now, I am undertaking yet another residency in the eastern part of the Netherlands; while supposedly, I was to be in Yokohama in person to do an artist-in-residency with Koganecho. However, due to the rather unstoppable pandemic, the Japanese border has been closed to all non-Japanese residents and nobody has a clue on when the border will be opened again. So here I am, undertaking my first-ever remote residency, attempting to create work in response to the Koganecho Bazaar 2021 theme ‘side by side’.

A series of double-exposure films are shown. Through double exposing on photographic films – first in the Netherlands, then in Japan – my attempt is to juxtapose the different times and spaces using analog medium for capturing elements related to postal services.

Without being able to transport myself to Japan, I could only rely on postal services for transporting my work to Japan – and that was how I decided to capture images relating to mail delivery that is a rather “invisible” yet crucial process throughout this project.



jolene mok