PROJECT SPACE
K-DIALECTIC is part of a multidisciplinary project that traces the afterlives of Japanese colonialism in Korea. This exhibition is one component of a broader inquiry: a photographic installation that draws from archival materials centring histories of forced labour and wartime sexual violence. Gathered through collaborations with Korean archives, activist networks, and cultural institutions, these materials are approached as fragments of history that reveal something unsettled and marked by rupture, recurrence, and erasure, rather than as a stable or complete account.
At the centre of the installation is an experimental image-making process Yook calls “Split Photography.” Archival photographs are reproduced, cut, interlaced, partially obscured, and reconfigured into a field of images that refuses to cohere into a single, unified view. These disrupted compositions evoke the ways traumatic histories are experienced and remembered, not as complete narratives, but as gaps, absences, and dislocations. These images must be approached obliquely – perceived in fragments, laboriously pieced together, and, at times, left irresolvable.
Here, the image becomes a site of tension: between visibility and obscurity, recovery and loss, the individual and the collective, and the ongoing need to reckon with what cannot be fully known. Meaning emerges in the intervals – in the spaces between images and in the effort to navigate them. Across the project of K-DIALECTIC, Yook treats the past not as something that recedes, but as something that endures and returns in fragments. Histories persist across generations and shape identities through absence as much as through inheritance.
In this way, K-DIALECTIC reflects on the conditions of traumatic memory. Histories of colonial violence often survive in partial forms: dispersed across official and unofficial archives, carried through individual testimony, or embedded in the body as that which cannot be easily spoken or shared. These fractured photographs echo this structure of remembrance, where what is missing is as present as what can be seen.
Images: Bomi Yook, K-DIALECTIC, 2025-26. Detail. Courtesy of the artist. Centre de production DAÏMÔN. Photo by: Camille Saucier.