Mira Mann

SSSSUUUU-GUUUUNGGGGGAAAA

with

Changdarc

Brigitte Huezo

iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo

Nam sook Kim-Brücker

Paula Julie Pintsch

Aro Han

Black Pearl de Almeida

Costume: Changdarc, Nam Sook Kim-Bücker, Mira Mann & Anna R. Winder

Part I

you will die even

if the god of death is your uncle

24. July 2021

4 pm

Part II

BANG!

14. August 2021

7 pm

Part III

the wish-granting bag

04. September 2021

5 pm

Meeting point at the large copper beech

In her three-part performance SSSSUUUU - GUUUUNG – GGGGAAAA, Mira Mann engages Korean performative traditions. The artist highlights these traditions’ capacity to produce decolonial histories, beyond Eurocentric perspectives. The starting point for the performance is one of the five orally transmitted, Korean Pansori narratives, with the title Sugungga (En: The Song of the Underwater Palace). Pansori is a Korean genre of epic and musical narration that emerged alongside the ceremonies and narrative song of the Mudang shamans in the seventeenth century, and which was interpreted by the Kiseang (Korean courtesans, entertainers, and sex workers of the Joseon Dynasty and its successors), among others. Mira Mann’s is interested in both Pansori’s hybrid narrative forms as well as its diverse interpretants, who are seldom mentioned in official, Korean historiography. Reconnecting with their narratives and modes of being, the performers adapt the piece freely to tell individual stories of subversive border crossers who aim to destabilize cultural hegemonies, racist misattributions, the privileging of heteronormativity, and binary gender ascriptions. Furthermore, they plot connections to sources of knowledge about lost relations of humans to nature.

Panoscene, 2021

Modular stage elements, burnt pine, steel

Mira Mann’s site-specific settings and live performances reflect the artist’s interest in speculative fiction, literature, and storytelling as a medium for visualizing social structures and alternative narratives. The modular installation Panoscene is a sculptural configuration, which takes on the additional function of a stage for the performance SSSSUUUU - GUUUUNG – GGGGAAAA. With the installation, the artist questions optic regimes in terms of both their regulatory and normative effects, and their potential for re-coding. The work’s form recalls that of the zeotrope. A zoetrope is a simple animation device, which consists of a drum adorned with slits. When the device turns, the images on the interior start to move. Due to the circular form of the apparatus, it can be observed from multiple people at once. The three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view points, on the one hand, to an omnipresent, collective gaze, and on the other, to a democratic, multi-perspectival dramaturgy, produced by the self-directed positioning of the viewers. In addition, the narrative can also be varied by the moving structure of the stage. In connection with the performance taking place within, the installation becomes a space that generates images, involved in the reception, framing, and transformation of the stories that are being told inside.  

Mira Mann (*1993 in Frankfurt am Main, DE) lives and works in Düsseldorf. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.