Jane Jin Kaisen: Burial of This Order

Jane Jin Kaisen

Burial of This Order

September 3, 2026 - January 10, 2027

Morris & Ann Dancyger Observatory Gallery

Burial of This Order brings together three works by Jane Jin Kaisen that underscore her ongoing interest in ritual, collectivity, capitalist critique, and the possibilities of social and political transgressions.

The exhibition centres on Kaisen’s titular video installation (2022), through which the audience is invited to follow a funerary procession gathered to ceremoniously bury a world order built upon hierarchy and division. The social actors called on to perform this duty, including artists, poets and activists, transgress traditional ceremonial practices indicating that this ritualized enactment is a funeral without grievers, assembled to dismantle unlivable structures, rather than lament current conditions. The exhibition’s central work is accompanied by Sorrow Waters This Land (2024) and Dokkaebi (2024). The former focuses on the setting for the procession – a derelict resort on Jeju Island that was abandoned following the IMF financial crisis of the 1990s, now persisting as a crumbling ruin of capitalism. The latter features powerful Dokkaebi deities from Korean folklore, unpredictable tricksters who dance suggestively through the space, haunting or perhaps compelling the procession.

The exhibition’s focal film builds towards a moment of revolutionary fervour when the procession refuses to complete their task and instead overthrows and dismantles prevailing power structures so that other narratives and realities can be imagined into being. Articulating their desires for transformation and disruption by way of collective emergence and rebirth, the mourners forsake the ritual burial but hold to their promise of elapsing this world order.

Curated by Noa Bronstein.