Yunjoo Kwak: The Chronicle of Boost Barracks

While visiting the ICA London in 2014, Yunjoo Kwak encountered the documentary Far from Vietnam (1967). The film’s French directors, cinematic activists and critical thinkers Chris Marker, Joris Ivens and Agnès Varda, criticised US imperialism while leaving France's own colonial occupation of Indochina unaddressed. Kwak noticed that South Korean soldiers appear in the film fighting alongside the United States as marginal figures in a larger narrative. South Korea's participation was a mercenary force sent in exchange for economic support from the US. Alain Resnais described this as bolstering the US global military campaign against communism. In opening up this marginalized history, the artist draws out persistent colonial power structures and dynamics of cultural imperialism.

In 2015, Kwak visited an asylum seekers' centre near Tilburg(the Netherlands) to interpret for an elderly woman who had escaped from North Korea. The centre was located in former barracks designed and built by Dutch military officer and architect Auguste Boost in 1938. Hastily constructed across the Netherlands to counter Nazi Germany's expansion, they continued to be used as training bases for the Dutch military after the Second World War, then became training hubs for troops deployed to the Indonesian War of Independence. In the 1950s they functioned as staging bases for forces dispatched to the Korean War under UN Command, and during the Cold War supporting NATO overseas deployments. Since the 1980s the buildings have served as asylum seekers' centres, where reverberations of war, colonialism, and the Cold War return in lives of those forcibly accommodated there. 

Starting from the narrative of the North Korean refugee who refuses to resettle in South Korea, The Defectors (2017) unfolds through layers of voices: a Dutch Christian activist, a Dutch professor of Korean studies, and the artist herself. The floorplans of the barracks are superimposed on the gallery floor with yellow tape, allowing visitors to move through the colonial infrastructure with their own bodies.

Only The Ports Are Loyal To Us (2019) traces connections between the Netherlands and the port of Surabaya, focusing on maritime mobility in colonial enterprise. Emerging from archival research at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the work reveals how audiovisual archives are themselves instruments of colonial power. Port workers in Surabaya float between archival footage and contemporary images—a collage across temporalities that conveys how colonialism continues to shape the present.

Two protagonists guide the exhibition. Peter, whom Kwak met while filming at one of the Boost barracks in Eefde, served as an audio telegraphist  assigned to wiretapping duties during the Cold War. Regularly transcribing intercepted speech without knowing what it meant, his role exposes the anonymity built into systems of information gathering and control. Amad, whom Kwak met in Surabaya in 2018, testifies to his experience of Dutch colonial infantilisation policies in 1937, when children were made to sing and draw plants instead of learning to read and write Dutch. He recalls being mobilised in 1941 for the Heiho army as an auxiliary soldier under the Japanese military, and fighting against the Dutch in the Indonesian war of independence. 

A persistent urge to reinterpret history animates Holy Territory (2026). Roode Brug, a military community in Surabaya, reenacts the Battle of Surabaya as a monthly ritual at the site of the destroyed former Dutch Supreme Court. While meant to commemorate Indonesian independence in 1945, the reenactment risks reinforcing patriotic fervour for the current Indonesian state. The ritual is revealed as ideologically loaded.

Drawing on fieldwork, observation, and the collecting of evidence, works on show in The Chronicle of Boost Barracks combine to overcome limitations of postcolonial discourses. Beginning with critical reflection on legacies of postwar Western European avant-garde film, Kwak's exhibition adamantly unfolds to question how institutional knowledge is structured. Her essayistic films blur fiction and nonfiction, in so doing they revive previously undisclosed identities and repressed memories and restore silenced voices from epistemic oblivion. 

Written by Ji Yoon Yang (Director of Alternative Space LOOP)
Translated and edited by Eunseo Kim (Assistant Curator of Alternative Space LOOP)

Pertigaan project: walking as decolonising praxis: March 14, 3pm, Lecture by Anitha Silvia, followed by a conversation with Yunjoo Kwak

Cold War unconscious: architecture, militarism and women: March 20, 3pm, Conversation between AfroAsia Collective (Sun A Moon, CHE Onejoon), Ji Yoon Yang, Yunjoo Kwak