Undefined Panorama 3.1

Social infrastructures, as Lauren Berlant suggests, are not rigid systems that structurally condition social formations. Rather, they are defined by their “patterning of social form”, their capacity to account for the emergence of certain organisations of life over others.

Over the past two decades, Yang Ah Ham’s work has explored social and political infrastructure and the systems and relations embedded within them. Her ongoing project Undefined Panorama (2018–present) is an installation made up of a series of iterative and interconnected videos that depict possibilities for social structures based on care and solidarity. Drawing in part on her own experiences of civil unrest and inequalities, Undefined Panorama explores issues including globalisation, work, basic income, education, culture, disasters and their aftermath.

The first half of 2021 has already given rise to many moments of protest and climate emergencies. In the newest iteration of the series, Undefined Panorama 3.1, Yang Ah Ham reflects on these moments and draws attention to the infrastructural failures affecting the world’s most vulnerable people. At the core of the work is an effort to understand the ways of being that exist within complex networks, and to ask what alternatives might be possible. The panoramic projection slowly reveals the complexity of lives entangled with geopolitical and environmental issues. In an attempt to develop an expanded understanding of infrastructure as cultural construction, Yang Ah Ham brings to the foreground settings, objects and concerns that have long been overshadowed in favour of neoliberal processes of production and competition.

In this work, Yang Ah Ham prototypes alternative social structures, and in agreement with Berlant, argues for a rearticulation of our affective relations with others, for a reconfiguration of our hopes, dreams, and cruel attachments, practical forms of getting unstuck, and reducing infrastructural failure and harm. Presented on a 12-metre panoramic screen, Undefined Panorama 3.1 considers possible materialities required to shape, energise, and sustain ways of living grounded in kinship and care, opening up a critical distance to other ways of designing the systems that we live within.

With the kind support of the Creative Industries Fund NL, Arts Council Korea, and Koreanisches Kulturzentrum Berlin.

July 10–18, 2021
1 pm – 9 pm
Kuppelhalle
Free admission