C. Ryu

About the 2023 individual/collective Exposure grant: The $20,000 grant supports "Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng,” a 60-minute narrative performance and multi-media altar on silenced Korean mythological women, projected to debut in 2025. Spotlighting three mythical feminist and shamanic 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.

Ryu'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. Ryu 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, domestically and in Asia. Her background has fueled her interest in exploring history-making through the intersection of technology—specifically violent surveillance methods like thermal imaging—and the ways history relies on technologies as objective truth tellers only to be complicit in erasure, re-fabrication, or archiving.  

"Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng,” in collaboration with Mudang Jenn Kim and Kayla Tange is a migratory experimental theater model where audiences will follow the performers on a journey of searching for missing feminist stories 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.