Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 artist Soojin Chang talks about their moving-image installation BXBY in this edition of FVU Frames. Chang is one of two recipients of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022. Following a nationwide call for applications at the beginning of 2020, each selected artist was awarded £25,000 to develop a significant new moving-image work with Film and Video Umbrella (FVU) for exhibition at Jerwood Arts and Leeds Art Gallery.
Soojin Chang’s BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, that follows Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. This short FVU Frames takes you through their thought process and narrative of the film, touching on fiction as a tool, reproductive science, and collaboration. Soojin explains their use of fiction as a tool to not only go beyond categorisation but also as a reflective and protective tool that provides room for playfulness when dealing with subjects of personal and colonial trauma, with reference to enslaved gestational labour of Korean and Black women. They also talk about the socialisation of science to serve the heterosexual, cis image of the family as well as touching on collaboration as an important way of exploring family beyond biology.
