White Bird
2023
Single-channel video and audio
4:23 minutes

White Bird was filmed in Cheorwon, South Korea at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the heavily fortified buffer zone between North and South Korea that has become an unanticipated refuge for over 100 endangered species. Red-crowned cranes and white-naped cranes are the most iconic of these species, and have been adopted by state narratives as symbols of political transcendence, despite the DMZ’s militarization directly preconditioning their settlement there. I visited the DMZ hoping to see cranes, and was interested in how such recognizable creatures might be filmed in a mode that registered them beyond their abstract significance. In the militarized area, cameras were not permitted, only phones. I ended up filming the landscape of the DMZ as a vertical space, following a crane-like bird whose species I could not identify through the grain of the image.


Installation view: