This is what I hear / Juli Song

1.04.2024 - 2.09.2024

01 - Exhibition Statement

This is what I hear is an installation piece that investigates the sharing of lived experience as political knowledge that is owned and expressed by people who experience it1. The work is a self-portrait in the form of a doll, made to the exact scale of the artist. Throughout the exhibition are fabric strips with racist comments made to the artist in her lifetime. The show aims to give these internalized experiences a physical form, the fabric strips becoming evidence that can no longer be refuted and dismissed. In this work, the doll, in place of the artist, challenges these statements, returning the gaze of the fabric strips and facing away from the dismissive ones with an unsettling defiant stare as visitors come face to face with the same remarks said to the artist. The space destabilizes the balance of power and takes control of hegemonic hierarchies by situating the doll as its focus.

1.   Potts, K., & Brown, L. (2005). Becoming an Anti-Oppressive Researcher. In L. Brown & S. Strega (Eds.), Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-oppressive Approaches (pp. 255–286). Canadian Scholars’ Press.

02 - Artist Statement

Juli Song (she/her) is a Korean Canadian artist, currently based in Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta). She primarily works in performance and installation, incorporating ceramics, fibre, and multimedia. Her practice heavily involves political themes and exploring social conditions reflected in her own cultural heritage, identity, race, and family history of war and immigration. Using traditional Korean folklore and the iconographic symbolism she grew up with, Juli develops contemporary narratives based on gender, and sexuality through a decolonial lens. Juli’s works have been featured in the Port Moody Arts Centre, Leigh Square Community Arts Village, the Evergreen Cultural Centre, Mountain Grass Gallery, cSPACE, nvrlnd. and at AUArts.