»Bibimbap News« is an ongoing research project that begins with a simple discovery: North Korean trash drifting onto a South Korean shoreline.
While physical movement between the two Koreas is tightly restricted and while South Koreans encounter only censored, state-mediated images of the North (and vice-versa), the ocean disregards borders, carrying debris across the peninsula’s geopolitical divide. This material drift becomes a counter-image to official narratives, mirrored by the circulation of virtual technologies that form another borderless space where, as Kim Jong-il once observed, digital networks evade national security regimes: »the internet is a special space where national security laws (of South Korea) are neutralized” and “the South Korean authorities cannot control it.«
Originally presented as a lecture-performance, the work has been reconfigured as a single-channel video installation. In their research, Jaeha Ban and Soyun Park navigate the intertwined currents of waste, water, virtuality, and technological flow, exploring how North Korea becomes reachable through stateless matter and networked imagination, even while remaining inaccessible to its closest neighbours. The work is presented together with the collected North Korean debris, allowing the physical traces of the ocean’s passage and the political contradictions it exposes to inhabit the exhibition space.
Research & performer: Seunghee Ha
Technical support: Thorwald van den Akker
Commissioned and supported by Collective WASTELAND
Originally presented at The Grey Space in the Middle, The Hague on 27 October 2023
Presented with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
CTM 2026 Exhibition
24.1. – 22.3.2026 | Free entry
daadgalerie & Kunstraum Kreuzberg