IRD Outdoor Learning in Paris: Of Specters or Returns

This Spring, Schiller students in Paris had the opportunity to visit the luminous and immersive ‘Of Specters or Returns’ exhibition at Le Bicolore, Maison du Danemark, which invited artist Jane Jin Kaisen to present a selection of her works dating from the period 2016-2020.

Kaisen negotiates the legacies of war, militarism, the partition of the Korean Peninsula, transgenerational memories and trauma, women’s unrealized aspirations for peace and international solidarity, between the personal and collective.

Born in Korea in 1980 and adopted in Denmark the same year, Kaisen is a visual artist, filmmaker, and professor of Media Arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Using video installation, experimental narrative film, photography, performance, and text, her artistic practice is informed by interdisciplinary research and engagement with minority communities.

Kaisen is particularly sensitive to their perspectives and positions, and more generally to the history of migration and diaspora. In her visually strong feminist works, which are poetic, polyphonic, and performative, the past and present enter into correspondence in a multiplicity of layers.

In addressing the subjects of memory, migration, borders, and translation, Kaisen creates a crossroads between the space of lived experience and knowledge, and that of larger-scale political histories.

This outdoor learning activity was convened by Dr. Myriam Benraad, Global Academic Chair for International Relations & Diplomacy at Schiller International University – Schiller.