Yang Ah Ham (b. 1968)

About the artist

Yang-Ah Ham was born in 1968 in Seoul, South Korea. After studying in Seoul, she moved to New York, where she received an M.A. from New York University in 1997. In her videos, she creates, with different materials such as videos and photos, fiction that metaphorically narrate and depict a certain aspect and face of our society. Themes like passing time and cycles are central subjects for her movies and investigations. The boundaries between fiction and truth are blurred to construct a distance to reality that speaks or points out complex issues, even taboos. Ham has also begun focusing on the human’s nightly dreaming as another natural cycle of nature. Her video functions like a mirror in which we can observe our society. The work parodies contemporary life like a theater of the absurd.

Work being shown at ATM

Name: Undefined Panorama 3.2 (2024)

Location: Modal gallery

Media: single channel video (13’35”), 7m curved screen

Description: The video work Undefined Panorama sketches a landscape of current, global narratives that are colored by class differences and struggles, technological changes, ecological crises, occupy movement and extinction rebellion. Starting from a critical awareness of the socio-economic conditions and the absolute values ​​of neo-liberal capitalism, Ham’s inquiry searches for alternatives, more humane value systems and associated forms of coexistence. She claims that it is up to art, departing from a profound awareness of urgent crises, to come up with alternative forms of imagination that encourage creative individuals to initiate transformative processes and actualize new social structures: structures that will be based on a recalibration of values ​​such as care, trust, and solidarity