Installation view of 《Axe and Dummy Heads》 (Insa Art Space, 2020) ©Insa Art Space

The exhibition title 《Axe and Dummy Heads》 refers to the props used in the 1895 film The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, known as the first instance of cinematic special effects. To depict the beheading scene of Mary, Queen of Scots, the filmmakers used an axe and a dummy head—substituting the actress with a mannequin between two consecutive shots. In the omitted interval between the queen’s final pose and her head dropping to the floor, an off-screen reality emerges: the coordinated movement of staff and technicians, each fulfilling their role to perfect the illusion of realism.

The collaborative group Kula! interprets this “interval of omission”—the invisible time of substitution and labor—as a tacit promise: a willingness to carve away parts of oneself and merge into the domain of the other. The name Kula! derives from the cyclical gift-exchange system practiced by communities in the Melanesian islands of the South Pacific, where gifts circulate among participants, fostering mutual dependence and trust.

The three participating artists continuously explore this notion as a working methodology, focusing on how their individual practices—video, performance, and sculpture—intertwine, exchange materials, and generate sensory and conceptual byproducts through collaboration.

Installation view of 《Axe and Dummy Heads》 (Insa Art Space, 2020) ©Insa Art Space

Rather than emphasizing hybridized outcomes, the exhibition foregrounds the temporal and processual layers lost before arriving at a “finished” state. It reveals how the process of exchange—between mediums, between artists, between on-screen and off-screen realities—opens unseen durations of creative labor.

Just as the early cinematic technique of substitution revealed another temporality hidden between frames, the exhibition illuminates the elasticity of time and collaboration that underlies artistic production itself.

Sojin Kwak, Bent, 2020, 2-channel video installation, 8min 11sec. ©Insa Art Space

Examining the artists’ exchange and disruption across mediums, the show uncovers shared metaphors embedded in their individual motifs—each suggesting survival through concealment, transformation through disappearance, or endurance through threat. For instance, one work references a fairy tale in which a character must hide their name to survive; another invokes the silkworm’s self-consuming lifecycle; another functions like a black box recording collisions and crises.

Through this interplay, the exhibition reveals not a seamless fusion but a tensioned coexistence—where “medium-specific expertise” is willingly relinquished under the gaze of others. Ultimately, the exhibition invites encounters with traces that resist surrender: fragments of individuality that persist through language, debris, and offscreen presence, laying bare the raw psychic space between ideal and reality, illusion and exteriority.

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