John never had a thing he called his own. He never even had a name. We call him John for the sake of distinction from every other blob out there. He is a hologram, an anti-hero and an infinite loop.
He had neither depth nor width nor form. He didn’t need those. We imagine the future to be sleek steel structures floating in the sky and streamlined transports. But the future is less about our own terms, though it is always about disruptions…
The passage above is an excerpt from a story that has apparently been germinating in visual artist Kitty Kaburo’s consciousness for some time now. In much the same way that the characters, settings and events in her story defy notions of time, space and being that hold sway in our day and age, the storytelling itself has broken out of the proverbial box that is literature and has (temporarily, we hope) found a comparatively more comfortable home in her visual canvas.
In keeping with her story’s themes of blurring dichotomies: the ephemeral and the permanent; cognizance and ignorance; home and displacement; identity and homogeneity; destruction and creation; evolution and devolution and revolution, Kaburo has reached into her own (im)personal history and juxtaposed roots, to co-opt visual traditions and recent images from a Korea that is doubly not her own (and even less ours!), which help the audience better appreciate the story while serving to confound understanding of it even more.
The result is a visual narrative that is organic yet modified, microscopic while being galactic, familiar but strange, and very bright while still very dark: A story that is time out of time this time…
– JP Agcaoili
