Based in Cologne/Seoul
hanigimnaworks@gmail.com
https://www.instagram.com/hani_gimna/
Hani Gimna (b. 1993, Busan, South Korea; she/her) is a visual artist and experimental performance filmmaker. Her work explores themes of multilingualism, schizophrenic-poetic wordplay, and neurotic/psychotic symptoms, reflecting her experiences as a neurodivergent immigrant woman.
She is mainly interested in how medium and methodologies produce stories and meanings. Her artistic practice centers on the reciprocal relationship between act of filming and narrative: how the mediating role of camera generates narratives, and on the other way around, how a performative narrative structures the act of filming.
A multitude of characters — AI image generators, historical figures, fictional characters from novels, and those born from fragmented experiences in her real life — encounter one another on various levels in her works. She uses a unique way of manipulating digital devices, creating an unconventional interplay between choreographed camera movements and the roles of crew-performers. Her work captures moments where theatrical elements trigger the audience’s imaginative power, shared experiences akin to positive hallucinations. By translating these moments from the stage into the cinematic realm, she investigates the dynamic chemistry that arises when the grammar of one medium is translated into another.
Link to the whole film : https://vimeo.com/883256392
In this experimental performance film, Hani Gimna intersects how a historical neurodivergent figure named Gérard Lucas handles language with the process of an AI image generator creating images. Both practices have in common that the mediating role of the mediums takes priority over the meaning. She looks at the performance with cinematic technique and theatrical elements which is mediated by the act of filming with choreographed camera movements through the lens of Gérard and AI. This means none other than reflecting on the configuration of the elements that make up the performance and asking practical questions such as how one should adjust the aesthetic stakes of those elements within their interrelationships. The conventional dynamic between the camera person and performers is reversed, and the act of filming and being filmed is entangled, camera functions such as shifting focus take the protagonist's position. Through this, this piece will become a battleground where what its components express and the materiality of those components alternately pulsate.