Dr. Ming Tiampo and Jinny Yu, Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?

Dr. Ming Tiampo, Professor of Art History at Carleton University and co-curator of the 2013 Guggenheim exhibition, Gutai: Splendid Playground, interviews Korean-born artist Jinny Yu about her site-specific installation Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?, a large three-dimensional painting with sound.

Inspired in the city of Venice and exhibited there at the Oratorio di San Ludovico from September 5 – November 22, 2015, the installation reflects on the migration crises in the Mediterranean Sea and Bay of Bengal--equally relevant in the United States--and explores a range of emotional responses and attitudes towards mass migration in the globalized world.

Don't They Ever Stop Migrating? mirrors Venice’s history as a place of cultural collision, of departure and arrival. A white three-dimensional painting surrounds the audience, broken up by hundreds of thousands of black ink brushstrokes that cover the structure in a vortex. From the accompanying chorus of incoherent English words and abstracted human voices, phrases emerge, remixed, layered, repeated, and interrupted by silences, suggesting an imminent threat that implicates the viewer in the common response of animosity and suspicion towards migrants--a response that usually arises from a fear of an invading “other.”

This exhibition is produced by Nuova Icona and supported by Ottawa Art Gallery.

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