Events Archive

Please join IRW for the second event in its 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecture Series on the theme of "Possession." Professors Jane Jin Kaisen (School of Media Arts, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts), Suzy Kim (Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers-New Brunswick), and Alexandra Chang (Art History, Rutgers-Newark) will discuss "Burial of this Order" at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 12th, at the Alexander Library Teleconference Room/Lecture Hall on the College Avenue Campus. This event is free and open to the public.

Jane Jin Kaisen negotiates and mediates the political history, cosmology, and spiritual culture of Jeju Island through feminist re-framings of myths, Jeju shamanic practice connected to the ocean and the natural environment, and the Jeju April Third Massacre. In 1948, shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War, state authorities and rightist paramilitary groups waged a “red hunt” in South Korea’s Jeju Island, unleashing genocidal violence upon large parts of the civilian island population.

In her 2022 film Burial of this Order, also the title of this event, a procession of non-conforming people – from musicians, artists and poets to anti-militant activists, environmentalists and diasporic, queer and trans people – carry a coffin together through the ruins of what turns out to be an abandoned resort on the South Korean island of Jeju. Time and place begin to lose their stability as mythical deities pass through the building, a heavy rain and wind blow through its cavities, and the group, as if possessed, overthrows and dismantles the prevailing order. Jane Jin Kaisen’s interdisciplinary work activates Jeju’s violent history as a site of oppression and rebellion and is a work with universal power.