Tomorrow's artist in 2012 selected by Sungkok Museum, Chan Sook Choi opens the new exhibition 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. Working and exhibiting installation, performance and video in Berlin and Seoul, she tries to recreate inner energy located in individual's memory in a limited space and time. As exploring people's memories from social, political, religious contexts, the artist finds a way to communicate with them. Its process shows and shares in various mediums, installation, video, art book, and performance.

The title 'The Nine Billion Names of God' derived from a belief of a lama in Himalaya appearing on a SF novel by Arthur C. Clarke. Like a story of it, if a mix of Nine Billion Names of God through computer programming is completed, the world will come to an end, the artist cites 'Nine Billion Names of God' through the exhibition. Those names are equivalent to 90 billion ways and records of life.

The exhibition consists of three parts. On the first floor, there is a new inter-media project 'The Nine Billion Names of God'(2013). During over 3 months of cooperation period, the artist sent 12 fundamental questions in an yellow envelope to 8 people. Through those questions, such as 'what's your memory to want to forget?' or 'where is your hiding place at a moment of extremely sadness and suffering?', people explore, reason and express a point where they create own life and society. Once a week, 'Intermedia performance' drawn from people's answers will tell an intertwined and extended human story in various appearances directly.

On the second and third floors, 7 video installations and 4 performance records will be exhibited. The space is where shows the presence and the artist invites people to stage their memories. The artist calls it 'narratology experiment'.

*image (left)
forgotten - nature-experiment, 2012
c-print, variable size
© Chan Sook Choi

Courtesy of Sungkok Museum