VIOLENT DESIRES

SOMA Artspace |  curated by Nabi Nara  |  July 15 – August 27, 2022

Sex, romantic relationships, reproductive labor, and structural power relations dominate the new body of work in Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo's solo exhibition, VIOLENT DESIRES. The works in the exhibition draw on the various ways in which class hierarchies, shame, Western violence and hypermasculinity manifest within intimate partnerships and the institution of the family. In doing so the exhibition seeks to understand how class, racialization and gender indifference affect the desire to belong.

VIOLENT DESIRES combines video, neon, LED installations, sculpture and the new 5 channel video, A Lover's Touch, that investigates domestic abuse within interracial relationships. Through a psychotherapy session with Dolores Moreira and Marc Eichmann, the work observes how patriarchal masculinity is linked to violence, racial fetishization, emotional repression and furthermore white supremacy and misogyny. The work scrutinizes how social expectations and economic codependency affect romantic partnerships while visualizing gross power differences specific to women of color. In seeking to understand how the racialized female body is both a sight of temptation and domination, A Lover's Touch addresses how shame and segregation sustain the silent realities of intimate partner violence.

Told through the murder of 3 female vampires, MOTHERNIGHT confronts how male lineage sustains ideas of kinship and power in the 3 channel sci-fi video installation. Based on village ghost operas, nursemaid lullabies, shaman folktales and the iconic South Korean films, The Housemaid (1960) and Lady Vengeance (2005), MOTHERNIGHT combines collage storytelling to unveil how colonial legacies and war histories are inherently linked to Western domination and patriarchal violence. The work reveals how personal as well as collective histories intersect throughout various cultures and time periods while posing critical questions in understanding the institution of the family beyond racial belonging.

Through various artistic contributions and myriad angles, VIOLENT DESIRES observes social polarization and ultimately class exclusion. The exhibition aims to dismantle Eurocentric ideologies that define cultural capital and otherness, providing space and reflection in order challenge subordinate and dominate power dynamics rooted in xenophobic tradition.

The project is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, The Federal Association for Visual Arts in Germany, and Delight Rental Services GmbH. 

Special Thanks – The Korean Film Archive, Director Park Chan-wook, Kim Dong-won, Christoph Westerbarkey and Delight Rental Services GmbH