Anne Duk Hee Jordan
Anne Duk Hee Jordan (born in Korea; lives in Berlin, Germany) builds her practice around the entangled relations between humans and nonhumans. Driven by her fascination with marine life, technology, sexuality, nutrition, and ecology, she creates installations in which organic materials and robotic creatures merge to offer a reflection on sociopolitical issues among the living and non-living. She probes the concepts of ephemerality and transformation intrinsic to biology in works that challenge agency relations, shifting the focus from human beings toward ecology as a whole.
The video installation Intimacy of Strangers / Intimité de l’inconnu takes us to a hybrid terrestrial-aquatic future world in which amphibians, insects, bacteria, fungi, observing chairs, and kinetic objects live side by side. The gallery’s walls, covered in an enveloping oceanic blue-green colour, form the background for the adventures of a tiny crab concealing itself in a marine landscape and microscopic spores taking flight and rising through layers of dead leaves. We are witness to scenes of complex cohabitation among different species—scenes in which living together also sometimes means dying together. On the floor, in front of the screens, strange creatures—vestiges of the Anthropocene—move discreetly, their movements barely visible. Over there, a teapot stirs slightly, as if it were waking from a long sleep. Over here, a spiky cocoon wiggles. Deep within this immersive environment where anthropomorphic relations between objects and subjects are disrupted, our bodies become part of the unfolding ecosystem. Jordan weaves these sensual symbiotic or reciprocal relations into a narrative by exploring the idea of a lasting partnership and commitment among different entities. She imagines a world in which all creatures, including humans, are symbionts. Through the speculative perspective of science fiction and the realism of a documentary approach, Intimacy of Strangers / Intimité de l’inconnu addresses the diversity and fluidity of existence through community and inter-species equity. By debunking established notions of nature, culture, and technology, Jordan envisages possible paths for a living-together, a “becoming-with,” on a damaged planet.