Kaja Clara Joo ︎
All These Dwellings
Are Temporary
Are Temporary
2026: 2- Channel Videoinstallation, Laser Etching on Copper in Steelframe
Filmed as an overlapping composition the movie unfolds between the quiet rural life of Corsicana, historically marked as the birthplace of the Texan oil industry, and the simultaneity of distant global upheaval. Images of slow, uneventful daily life are set against circulating footage of protests in Iran, alongside demonstrations against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Structured as a split screen, the artist resists narrative coherence or linear storytelling. Instead, it produces a continuous collision of temporalities and intensities: the serenity of a ghost town shimmering in its past of economic hypergrowth, and the sedation of violent events taken from the news. Bodies appear only in partial gestures: families mourning the dead by dancing or bodies thrown to the ground, refusing identification and resolvment. The film assembles these materials as a flux of confusing impressions with no sequential account. It holds together incompatible realities and an inability to order experiences while foregrounding uneven conditions: of safety and privilege, or rather the lack thereof.
