C. Ryu

About the 2023 individual/collective Exposure grant: The $20,000 grant will support "Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng,” a 90-minute narrative performance and art installation on silenced Korean and Korean American women, projected to debut in 2025. Spotlighting eight mythical and historical women and their stories that have been erased from history for being too rebellious, "Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng,”  will be an experimental theater spectacle.

Caroline Yoo’s practice is based in performance, lens based installations, experimental capture and social practice, utilizing translation and storytelling as a tool to map forgotten histories; to reveal psychological shadows haunting the diaspora; and to perform contemporary translations of rituals for the living. Yoo creates stories centered on the Asian, Asian American and Korean diaspora through retellings of lost oral histories, refabricating ancient mythologies and giving space for marginalized voices that were often silenced. Although her work is conceptual, she comes from a technical background in photography, having worked as a photojournalist in her early 20s. Yoo freelanced for nonprofit clients in Asia where she mainly worked documenting the lives of women who had been domestically abused or sexually trafficked.

"Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng,”  is a migratory experimental theater model where audiences will follow the performers on a journey of searching for missing stories of women in the Korean diaspora. The form of the theater mimicking the loss of these stories in our everyday reality as a consequence of patriarchal and colonial erasure.