The Guryong Walks | LINDA HAVENSTEIN | Walking Art / Walking Aesthetics

The Guryong Walks is a video walk installation created in Seoul (South Korea), which superimposes the structure of a local shanty town on iconic places of the city’s public space. The work revolves around the fact that the soon-to- be-evicted slum cannot be found as a settlement on online map services, while several yet to be build iconic places in Seoul metropolitan area are already signed up online as existing.

In the piece, the outlines of the shanty town were retraced in several iconic places of the city as video walks - such as the rebuild palace, the financing district or the soccer world cup park.

In leaving the structure’s outlines as GPS data on Google’s servers, the walks try to create a visibility to structures of virtual and political invisibility.

Using both GPS and the body as measurement and drawing tools, the walks try to explore the making of places.

The Guryong Walks, 2015, 1920 x 1080 video, gouache on paper, 15:29 mins, 40 x 40 cm, Installation view

The Guryong Walks, 2015, 1920 x 1080 video, gouache on paper, 15:29 mins, 40 x 40 cm, Installation detail

My works often start with a question, which I approach and examine in an experimental manner. More than formulating an answer, my focus is to embrace the matter comprehensively and to find new perspectives on the subject. My works are mostly build on intense research, and often deal with bodies and technology in the context of intellectual history. In addition to a focus on video and installation art I work with a wide range of media and approaches.

In recent years I developed a practice of 'performed maps', a video walk series which combines an investigatory approach to physical and virtual space with performative aspects and forms of experimental storytelling. In this series, digital structures in urban space are retraced as video walks, visualizing the different layers of space lying beneath the visual dimension.

The works are an investigation into the intertwined relation between physical spaces, bodies and data, and examine the making of space as an image of our society.