View of “Mira M. Yang: Ensemble,” 2026, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.

THIS SHOW UNFOLDS in two chapters, the first being in Fribourg and the second in Paris. Having several chapters suits the material and exhibition quite well, as it is very much about the process of circulation and transmission of cultural performances, about histories and images in transit.

I initiated this research when I came to Paris for a residency two years ago. I brought along a copy of Coréennes (Korean Women), a 1959 book by Chris Marker, which I had found in the library of the Museum of East Asian Art Cologne. It features photographs he took in ’56 as part of a trip around North Korea organized by the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, or PCF). I went to the Cinémathèque Française, where his estate is held, and looked through all the pictures from this journey. I’m fascinated by Marker’s way of sampling memory, place, time, myth, and the everyday into a highly sensitizing and poetic cinematic language. At the same time, Coréennes is a precious document of everyday life in North Korea in the ’50s, of international socialist cultural programs, and of the beauty of North Korean women as seen through the camera of a Frenchman, which also makes this book a document of the Western male gaze at the time.

A few of Marker’s portraits from Coréennes feature Choi Seung-hee, a North Korean dancer, and Ahn Seung-hee, her daughter, both of whom he photographed during a performance at Moranbong Theater in Pyongyang. I was intrigued by these images because I’ve been looking into cultural portrayals of Asian femininity, including in art collections, and how these are staged in, or co-opted by, other cultural settings. I’m interested in how those portrayals have historically informed global cultural narratives and exchanges that, in turn, have affected—and continue to affect—the way we see one another today.

Mira M. Yang, Cinematheque Moranbong, 2025, 80 projected slides. Installation view, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, 2026.

I made a series around these images, including a quasi-stop-motion animation of Marker’s photographs titled Cinematheque Moranbong (2025)—referring to the two places where these images were taken, first by Marker, then by me. At the Cinémathèque, I rephotographed Marker’s originals through an archival magnifying lens, which distorted the images. Because rolls of film contain matter from the very place they were taken, and because moving through these materials (from someone else’s specific angle and perspective) is quite a physical experience, I paced through details in each print at a certain rhythm: I reanimated the archival photographs into a sort of dance. The resulting work comprises two Kodak slide projectors. Each one projects an image onto the same surface, one on top of the other, in a progression of slow dissolves. Cinematheque Moranbong functions like a magic lantern, an early form of cinematic equipment.

View of “Mira M. Yang: Ensemble,” 2026, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.

Choi Seung-hee was quite famous in her day. She trained as a modern dancer in Japan and toured around the United States and Europe. Her solo stage program was made from a highly imaginative, eclectic selection of traditional pan-Asian references, poses, and gestures. There is a program booklet in the archives of the Centre National de la Danse, which documents the dances she performed at Salle Pleyel and Théâtre Chaillot in Paris. This program was the starting point from which I, in collaboration with Paula Pau, a contemporary dancer and choreographer, began reimagining Choi’s choreographies. We were especially interested in how Choi deployed gender and self-exoticization in her work. In one number, she appears as her own drunken father, dancing in a very folk way, mixing modernist, German Expressionist choreographic elements with talchum, a Korean traditional mask dance. In another, she embodies a very erotic and ambiguous bodhisattva figure, echoing its Buddhist depictions and the audience’s expectations.

The resulting film, Transmissions, is partially a response to my encounter with Marker’s images. Here, we used a small body camera that we attached to Paula’s arm while she interpreted choreographies at sites around Paris that are linked to Choi’s visit to the city. We went, for example, to the Théâtre Chaillot and the Musée Guimet, where a lot of Asian art objects are kept (Choi’s work was often inspired by such collected objects and artworks). In the film, you see the world and various sceneries being moved by the dance. Sometimes Paula chooses to turn the camera on herself, but the film is mostly composed of distorted moving images of contemporary Paris which, in many aspects, still looks like the version of Paris that Choi saw.

Mira M. Yang, Transmissions, 2026, video, color, sound, 16 minutes. Installation view, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.Mira M. Yang, Transmissions, 2026, video, color, sound, 16 minutes. Installation view, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.

Something from Choi’s performances that has largely gone missing is the sound and musical accompaniment. She must have traveled with a group of musicians, but for the most part we don’t know who they were or what they sounded like. There is one recording of her singing “A Garden in Italy,” a song she translated and performed in Korean. We included it in the film. But beyond that, the sound in Transmissions is subtle: mostly breathing and the sounds of Paris through which Paula moves.

In order to bring back sound, I decided to translate our choreographies into a score by using Kinetography Laban notation, which is a type of movement notation. It views the body and its movements as a machine that can be captured through a language composed of symbols and patterns. I collaborated with two notators: One has a background in Korean dance and is a contemporary dancer herself, while the other is very experienced in dance notation. The Laban notations formed the basis of a symbol-score that is interpreted in the exhibition by a deconstructed pipe organ. This sonic machine—a pneumatic system operated by wind and air—is partially concealed inside walls. It produces very low hums and rattlings rather than harmonious melodies.

View of “Mira M. Yang: Ensemble,” 2026, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.

The organ’s elements are mirrored like a body, representing its different parts. This was important for me because it’s like physically operating parts of a body through breath, spread across the space, turning the archive back into something corporeal. The pipe organ is also a very architectural instrument. This system is conceived to interact with the space and reacts to movement within it.

“Ensemble,” the title of both this installation and the exhibition, refers to a group of musicians making music together, addressing the broader question of how we can live together in society. It is not about producing a cohesive documentation of Choi’s work and legacy, but a hallucinatory, momentary, fragmented experience. I wanted to look at bodies and archives that have historically been exoticized and objectified in order to translate them through my own perspective and moment in time. Reanimating or restaging this material through performance is a way of countering totalizing pictures of Choi, her legacy, and imperialist ideology.

–As told to Thomas Patier

“Mira M. Yang: Ensemble,” curated by Kathrin Bentele, runs from September 12 to November 13, 2026, at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, Switzerland. A second iteration will open at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, on November 23.

View of “Mira M. Yang: Ensemble,” 2026, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg.