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16/04/15 • Free Form : Soojin Chang

The Renegade: Soojin Chang at L/R Residency

EN
16/04/15 • Free Form : Soojin Chang

The Renegade: Soojin Chang at L/R Residency

Artist, film-maker and writer Soojin Chang is the artist-in-residence at L/R Residency for the month of April, where she is adapting a text for her forthcoming film project, The Renegade. Below is the artists brief description of the upcoming project, as well as past video works that she will be finalizing during the residency.

During my time at the L/R Residency in April, I will be developing an experimental script and storyboard for my next video project. It is an abstract adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Renegade, a short story from the volume Exile and the Kingdom (1957). I’ll have to see which changes I make from the original text before I can provide a synopsis, but more or less, The Renegade is about a man who has lost his tongue.

My past two video projects have been created in atypical nomadic situations Mare Nubium was filmed while driving a full loop around Iceland’s Ring Road; and Noonday Demon was created while traveling through rural villages in South Korea. When shooting, it was just my collaborator, Sophie Merrison-Thieme, who co-directed and performed in both videos, and me. After returning to New York, I worked with sound designer and musician Will Berman, who created synthetic foley sounds by re-enacting Sophie’s performance, as well as an original score.

For The Renegade, I plan to continue this nomadic process. The original text is set in Taghaza in northern Mali in a salt mining center. I think that a surreal and even more remote landscape is necessary to communicate the story of The Renegade in an abstract, contemporary context. I hope to be able to shoot the video in the Namib in South Africa this fall.

Soojin Chang was born in 1991 in San Francisco, CA and raised in South Korea and California. She studied Film and English at University of California, Berkeley. Her works blend performance art and cinema, addressing notions of time, memory, identity, and technology. She is currently based in New York City.