mother may recall another

Mira Mann

Info: Mira Mann’s practice includes time based and site specific modes of working, moving image, and cross-media settings in which Mann explores fictional spaces and storytelling as a medium for visualizing social structures, collective memory, and new narratives within the play of identities. Their discursive scenographies evolve around transcultural relations of human and non-human agents and the glitches they generate between experience and memory, reality and fiction. Mann’s first solo exhibition at the gallery centers on the eponymous three-channel video mother may recall another (2022) which recounts the story of Shim Cheong, the half-orphaned daughter of a blind man, who sacrifices herself to the sea in order to regain her father’s sight. Mann links the story of the pansori tale – a genre of musical storytelling that originated in 17th-century Korea in close relation to local shamanistic ceremonies – with remembered experiences of their own mother. The video was filmed at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne as well as in Mokpo, Korea, their mothers hometown, which was largely shaped by the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of the 1970s and Japanese colonialism and which she left at the age of 20. (…)