Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide): Four Months, Four Million Light Years / Hamza Halloubi: You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence

ARGOS in collaboration with Kunstenfestivaldesarts is excited to open solo exhibitions by two prominent Brussels-based artists.

From Saturday, May 15 onwards, Korean/Dutch artist Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)’s Four Months, Four Million Light Years presents a shamanic healing journey through space and time.

This immersive film installation addresses the colonial narratives behind transnational and transracial adoption, through the historical relations between the Netherlands and Korea.

The colonial print Een Schaman ofte Duyvel-Priester [Shaman or Devil’s Priest from the Tungus, 1692] by Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen, acts as a pivotal entry point for a spiritual journey through time. This print is the first Western depiction of a shaman. It marks the beginning of a long history of racialised and infantilising descriptions of Asian people by white Europeans and the violent eradiation of shamanistic cultures by missionaries.

The four months of the title refer to a Korean decree, which required children to stay a minimum of four months in a Korean orphanage in order to become adoptable by law for the lucrative transnational and transracial adoption industry. This industry started to flourish after the Korean War and still perpetuates the same colonial imagery from 300 years ago.

Textiles, paper text banners, and drawings surround this video projection. Shamanic poems, songs, and visions invoke the ancestors for support in an homage to those who have been cut off from their mothers, fathers, family, ancestors, land, culture, and spirits.

Consecutively, from Saturday, May 29 onwards, Hamza Halloubi’s You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence presents a new body of works by the Moroccan-born artist.

The exhibition originates from the idea of silence, which Halloubi defines as “an empty space of discourse,” a concept he then translates to the medium of video. How can one make visible what usually lives in the interstices of the dominant image?

Through a careful layout of works, Halloubi presents an archaeological journey into the Western gaze, directed towards the Maghreb region. The artist questions the ability of speech as a tool of transmission, transition, and uplift. Three projections share a circular shape, occasionally framing the mouths of the narrators depicted, making their speech visible, while addressing topics of deflection, loss, and value.

These three larger projections are interspersed with a series of video portraits filmed in the streets of Brussels. These short videos feature raw gestures that turn and divert the camera, making it a tool to expose the relationship between looking and being looked at in public space. They are presented alongside a number of abstracted paintings that feature words and stills from the videos in the exhibition.

Hamza Halloubi, in assembling these works, creates a constellation of portraits: a firmament of stories and identities, and the silences that exist in the spaces between them.

More info online.

Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)’s Four Months, Four Million Light Years is organized with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium.

*Image descriptions: [1] A space with black carpet and walls, and a white ceiling. A large projection shows an image of a traditional Korean interior in which a man is playing cymbals and a woman is playing tambourine with her mouth agape as if singing. There are colorful banners with texts written in Korean on both sides of the projection. [2]: A circular shaped image of a woman whose face is hidden by the sweatshirt she is taking off. In the background we see a view of a city on the Mediterranean.