SUPERFISHES!

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Website: http://superfishes.vivyanefernando.info
Works at: Seoul Art Space_GeumCheon
Stays in: 2010
Genre: Visual Arts/Installation Arts
Profile: 

- Lee Jihoi

2009 BFA, Studio Practice and Contemporary Critical Study, The Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK


Solo Exhibition

2010 September, The Stables Gallery, London, UK

Selected Group Exhibitions

2010 The Penguin that goes to the Mountain, Nam June Paik Arts Center, Gyeonggi, Korea
       XRAY, Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden
       Eternal Tango, Ozlem, London, UK
       Chimney Cinema, London, UK
2009 Black River Festival, Vienna, Austria
       Nuart, Stavanger, Norway
       Do It Yourself, Artist led Organisation, Goldsmiths, London, UK
       Magazzini Del Sale, Venice, Italy
       ISUPERFISHES!, The INTIMADANCE-AGLY festival, Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, Israel
2008 Ludic Times: Art of Gaming, National Museum, Singapore



- Naama Yuria

2009 BFA, Studio Practice and contemporary critical studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK


Selected Exhibitions

2010 The Ozlem Extravaganza, Turkish restaurant, London
       Chimney Cinema, London, UK
2009 Translation: Chapter Two; collaboration with the artist Juan Cruz, Crate gallery, Margate, England / At The Centre for the Study of World Civilisations, Institute of Technology, Tokyo
       SUPERFISHES!, The INTIMADANCE-AGLY festival, Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, Israel
2008 A Private View, Kensal Green Cemetery, London
2007 See Not / Fear Not, The Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery, Umm el-Fahem, Israel
2005 The Light Wave, The Beit Reuven Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel
       3 cities Against the Wall, The Artists House gallery, Tel-Aviv, Al-Hallaj Gallery in Ramallah, The ABC No Rio gallery in New York
2001 New Israeli Video Art, screening at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque, Israel





Works: 

Superfishes! was founded in 2006 in a corner studio of Goldsmiths by Jihoi Lee and Na’amaYuria; Korean and Israeli artist based in London, Seoul and Tel Aviv. We seek out exuberant creative productivity for survival e.g. film, food, music making, event hosting, digital exploration, carpentry and alchemy. Superfishes! is an invented word, based on the combination of “superficial” and “suspicious”. We probe with our antennas for global suspicions beneath the surface of superficial facades. We are artists who formerly worked in the domains of architecture and television in Seoul and Tel Aviv. Using these experiences, we combine pop culture and the reading of built environments to infiltrate, twist, and detourne the existing structures. Superfishes!’s collaborative and individual work has been shown internationally in London, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Kent, Vienna, New York, Venice, Ramallah, Stavanger, Umm el-Fahem, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul.


Superfishes!




























Microcalimate Change-via scenario
still image from chapter3, Digital Video(HDV), 00:06:00
2010
The Chimney Cinema
Comic
2010



A Critique of SUPERFISHES!
Aaron Tan(Art Director, TBWA)

Superfishes!, the collaborative practice of artists Jihoi Lee and Naama Yuria was conceived in their art school years in London, where the two first met and established a compelling and lasting synthesis of ideas, friendship and expression.

Evolving through spontaneous points of convergence, the work of Superfishes! simultaneously performs and constructs a kind of fantastical fiction as a way to navigate, float and trespass a hegemonic language of self-perpetuating violence. If the geopolitical is a kind of absurdist theatre contingent upon the tripartite production of anticipation, (in)action and excess (the last is crucial for the circuit to complete itself), we are citizen-actors bearing witness to its horror, in as much as we are complicit with its perpetuation. Superfishes! is, in this sense, a hybrid bastard child of two nations mired in the stage/state of violence, Israel and South Korea, both looking towards the soothsayer of capitalism for guidance out of their contemporaneous impasses.

To transverse this fiction of the geo-political, Superfishes! engages in an often speculative process in which the representation and production of this fiction is appropriated and re-composed. In the film <Microclimate change>, Superfishes! literally builds a navigation tool, a portable windmill that converts kinetic energy into a flickering bulb, to harness the potentiality of mapping Israel and South Korea beyond its dominant formats. Rather than two separate and distinct points (in a map or in the horizon), the two are juxtaposed, compressed and conflated in the continuum of the moving image, where the edit serves to tease out the excesses of these constructs for another competing imaginary. By appropriating editing and stylistic motifs from mass media, Superfishes! enacts the utopic freedom and mobility contained and instrumentalised in the technical reproduction of these regimes, in an attempt to express the image of the trans-national. In <Microclimate change>, Superfishes! seems to suggest that this image is borne out of slippages of language (like the texture of their namesake) and discharges from the circuitry of the geo-political, with an investment in the marriage of chance and deviation.


Superfishes! curiously infects these utopic ideals with a child-like levity, and their exuberance presses upon the viewer to participate and inhabit their makeshifts worlds¹ . As if recollecting the coming into consciousness moment in which these ideals were first conceived, utopian signification is rescued from the weight of sedimentation via the transmission of an ironic low-fi, cut and paste aesthetic. According to Walter Benjamin ², if the adult world could be freed from its spell, it is in the child’’s creative perception where the old world of symbols could be engaged with the newest technology and reawake the potential revolutionary energy of the two.