Ep Park

A life as an “outsider” formulated Ep’s practice. Every experience as a perpetual outsider looking in and faced with a “wall” which refuses to echo back or when it answers it leaves one with a feeling of paralyzing impotence, that each “gob smacking” experience drives the practice and the practice itself is a survival technique to keep asking: how can “we” from this precarious position envisage clues to all this entangled puzzle hidden beneath the smooth surface of the wall so that we are able to find the understandings and open up new possible responses.

Amongst piling questions that need to be contextualized and as a creature within the ever-present cycle of deterriotization and reterritorization, the trajectory of the deployed feminist’s slogan “personal is the political” connects to the concept of “the art of not being governed quite so much”. To avoid ending up just being another self-destructive survival tool that turned out to be an end in itself, Ep conceives of each project as the “conversation piece”, various objects are props to form “intertextuality” where the “paradox of autodidact” is a folded-in overall concept for the practice. (Hence the main components are collaged verbal “essay writing happening”, and the concept of index cards of underlined library books which shares the multiple points of thought forming, “uncoerced kindness in human interaction”).

1983 per-hap, Büro k für i.o.f.s. (in our forged soul),2016, provides a stage, the büro, the forged site of dissemination, to facilitate actual process of production; where Ep takes a position of translating machine attempting to "search of lost time" by making 'gestures', translating untranslatable transcription from the Camus’s speech during weekdays while the visitors to become the partners in that endless machinery of "citation, quotation and implantation", excerpting and collecting from the references occupying in the space.

This taking of “pseudo-job/duty” in order to trigger conversations with the visitors is the continuation of the “gallery guide Park” job which is integral main component of WORK IN PROGRESS FOR BETTER TOMOR-ROW by u nity infraproject ltd, 2014. These are “subtle and polite” performances that are refracted mirror images of “feminist expressionist” performances in that both are situated to subvert and recompose the positions of bodies in “place”.

Ep Park graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and an MA in kontextuelle Malerei from the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

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