Sojung Jun: Overtone

Barakat Contemporary is proud to present a solo exhibition of new works by Sojung Jun, Overtone, from November 8 to January 7, 2024. 

Probing into Sojung Jun’s ongoing investigation of  ‘sound’, the artist launches Syncope for the first time, an AR application developed especially for her first exhibition for Barakat Contemporary as an extension of the new film presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul for the Korea Artist Prize 2023. Featuring a new series of sculptures entitled Epiphyllum I (2023) and Epiphyllum III (2023) along with the new three channel film Overtone, Jun proposes an interesting perspective that enables an organic network of relationship between sculptures, video, and digital data that transcends time and space, and the real and virtual. The nexus of the exhibition further plays with the term ‘overtone’ by overlapping the speed and displacement of body, plants, data, and language that cross borders as essential metaphors within the narratives of Asian women in pursuit of finding sound and other possibilities. 

Overtone (2023) revolves around the journey of Soon A Park, a gayageum player who has traveled across North and South Korea in search of sound. For the production of the new film, three composers from Korea, Germany, and Guatemala collaborated to compose three songs, with predetermined length and tempo each for gayageum, koto, and guzheng, which are performed in accordance by KOTOHIME, the East Asian zither ensemble who play together to embody the theme of crossing borders.

The presence of lingering reverberation, vibration, and tremolo weaving through each sculpture and in between screens act as a connective thread, inviting the viewers for an immersive experience of the works through the keen act of listening, sensing, and imagining throughout the run of the exhibition.