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Butch Palace for the Son(子宮: uterus),
Audience-participatory Workshop Performance,
38min44sec, 2023
Ibanjiha, the artist, starts with a short lecture in a Korean SAT teacher manner on the subject and collects the audience's collective intelligence on the subject, “Butch uterus.” After the meditation on the subject, the audience begins to sculpt their idea with clay. A critique session on each piece highlights the whole event at the end.
Ibanjiha published a literary reportage with the title, Butch Palace for the Son(子宮: uterus), in the Summer of 2022 in a literary magazine called Epic, South Korea. The writing is based on Ibanjiha’s interviews with two middle-aged butch lesbians who had to confront their uterus due to medical issues such as myoma and endometrial polyp. Their uneasiness and inadequate feelings towards their female organs and concepts of butchness were captured throughout the piece. After completing the writing, Ibanjiha brought this theme to a performance piece with the same title. Given the fact that 자궁(子宮:Uterus in Korean) is composed of Chinese characters meaning "Palace/place for the Son," the artist translated the original Korean title, 부치의 자궁, into English, Butch Palace for the Son.
Ibanjiha is a multidisciplinary artist who plays and plays alongside patriarchy, gender boundaries, and queerness through various mediums, such as drawing, animation, singer-songwriting, performing, broadcasting, writing, manifesting, and humor. To the gender minorities, queer allies, and feminist activists in South Korea, however, Ibanjiha is much more than an artist—they are a queer living legend and a larger-than-life personality; a household name, a veritable celebrity, and a symbol of creative modes of queer survival and building community in the staunchly heteronormative society. Ibanjiha, a compound term wedding queer (Iban이반) and underground apartment (Banjiha반지하) in Korean, is at once the site where the artist dwells and the mode of living characterized by a lifetime of artmaking in precarity. An everyday life facing the dangers of flooding, fungus, lack of privacy and safety, the vulnerability of living is integral to the multimodal artmaking practice, genre, and persona that is Ibanjiha. By their own art of indeterminating and blurring boundaries, Ibanjiha has persistently developed their own queer aesthetics characterized by the creation of a new site from within the rigid binary gender system, opening up an unexpected queer universe in the most provocative and unprecedented ways.
Official: www.soyoonkim.com
fan page: www.ibanjiha.com
Ibanjiha2019@gmail.com
