TAE HWANG & MR BARNADAS

Our practice has always been shaped by distance: the geographic expanse that we ourselves have traveled as immigrants, the arcs of time and space that have separated us between East coast and West coast, and the passage of the work itself through territories that we can never foresee. We have tried to mine this distance, this critical gap that Homi K. Bhabha refers to as “the in-between,” because it is in this liminal space that identities, social and cultural configurations, can still be negotiated. Migration, therefore, has served as the motor of our practice. Migration and not immigration which, after all, is still anchored by fixed points of departure and arrival. Avoiding the closure of absolute beginnings and terminal endings, our work seeks to inhabit and prolong a “moment of transit.” To that end, working as a Collective has been imperative, enabling us to avoid the stasis of singular intentions and objectives by conceiving ourselves always as plural, engaged in dialog and dissent. Between us we speak multiple languages, which forces a continuous translation that reminds us always of what it means to be “foreign”, to be in some sense strangers even to ourselves. Working collectively turns us away from the illusion of a center, and produces at the start, a crucial displacement and a productive disorientation.