The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, South Korea is presenting its 2024 MMCA Film & Video programme, Human and Nature: From Romance to Horror, which runs from May 29 - August 24, 2024. The programme consists of three parts, each featuring film and video art works examining the multifaceted relationship between human beings and nature. Soojung Yi, Curator, MMCA Film and Video, joined STIR in an interview to discuss the screening programme.

The first part of Human and Nature ran from May 24 - July 14 and presented works by several artists across multiple screening sessions. The works included the short films Happy Bees (1954), The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1974), Land Makar (1981) and Garden Pieces (1998) by Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait, Geographies of Solitude (2022) by Canadian filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills, The Dam (2022) by Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, The Scene of Crime (2011) by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar, The Forgotten Space (2010) by American photographer Allan Sekula and American filmmaker Noël Burch, Wild Relatives (2018) and Foragers (2022) by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna, and Korean filmmaker Jeong Jae-eun’s Cats’ Apartment (2022). The second part ran from July 19 - August 4 and presented several films by Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz. The third part, which began on August 9 is currently running through August 24, and compiles the film works from the first two parts into a marathon cinema screening.

In the films of Margaret Tait, people are comparatively comfortable with nature. They don't try to hurt their environment… – Soojung Yi, Curator, MMCA Film and Video

The curator explains that she selected moving image works across genres and regions, united solely by their shared theme of human beings interacting with nature. Cherri’s The Dam is a hallucinatory, supernatural thriller set against the sun-baked landscape of Northern Sudan. We follow Maher, a manual labourer working on the Merowe hydroelectric dam project in 2019, as he listlessly follows news broadcasts about the impending deposition of President Omar al-Bashir, a highly controversial figure, now in prison. In secret, Maher builds a strange statue which The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw likened to a “Wicker Man for the Arab Spring” in 2023. Meanwhile, Manna’s Foragers combines fiction, documentary filmmaking and archival footage to explore the effect that Israeli nature protection laws have on the lives of Palestinians who are accustomed to foraging for the artichoke-like akkoub and za’atar (thyme). The film also goes beyond the power dynamics that define interactions between the Israeli state and Palestinian people to celebrate the natural beauty of the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and stretches of Jerusalem.

These two films certainly express the broad messaging of the programme: political and industrial interests – who neither care for people nor for nature – but have come to define the relationship between both. Yi discusses some of the other works included in the programme, telling STIR, “In the films of Margaret Tait, people are comparatively comfortable with nature. They don't try to hurt their environment, unlike (people in) other films. Jeong's film, Cat's Apartment, leads us to look at the world from the perspective of cats instead of people.”

Currently, audiences at the museum can also view the film works of Ana Vaz. Her films being shown during the third part of Human and Nature include Sacris Pulso (2008), Les Mains, Negatives (2012), The Age of Stone (2013), Occidente (2015), A Film, Reclaimed (2015), There is Land! (2016), Amerika: Bahia de las Flechas (2016), Look Closely at the Mountains (2018), Atomic Garden (2018), Apiyemiyeki? (2019), Pseudosphynx (2020), 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020), It is Night in America (2022) and The Tree (2023). The MMCA’s film and video programme goes beyond lamenting the ongoing environmental collapse and climate crisis to introduce visitors to new (and highly critical) ways of looking at the relationship between human beings and nature through filmmaking. In doing so, it also sets the stage for compelling moving image practices to take over the imaginations of their audience.

‘Human and Nature: From Romance to Horror’ runs from May 29 - August 24, 2024 at MMCA, Seoul.