Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg
Mira M. Yang develops work that engages with cultural transfer, memory, and belonging from a diasporic perspective. It emanates from something performative or staged, which holds the image of a transmission. To perform, in this sense, means to transmit signals, energies, and affects. It is often a performing body that acts as the transceiver, although more recently M. Yang has also used animated sculptures made from machine parts as surrogates for absent human bodies.
For the exhibition Ensemble, which will be presented in two chapters at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris, M. Yang has developed new sound assemblages and a film, which are being shown in varying configurations.
To stay with the image of transmission, this also harbors the danger of a disturbance, interruption, or noise in which the signal is lost and becomes inaudible. M. Yang’s work marks moments of historical amnesia and absence, giving them a form that, although unable to restore what is lost, puts something else in its place. Various surrogate bodies and substitutes emerge in the exhibition, in which cultural heritage reverberates as an echo, a trace, or a sediment. The unresolved codings and images they contain demand a nuanced reconsideration.
At the center of Ensemble lies an exploration of the artistic legacy of the dancer and singer Choi-Seung Hee (1911–1969), the first performer from colonial Korea to appear on stage in Europe. Her choreographies fused influences from Korean, Chinese, Indian, and European modernist traditions, propagating a non-conformist and hybrid form of movement. Her legacy is not only sparsely documented but also distorted by violent marks inflicted in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and socialism. M. Yang does not approach this complicated heritage by claiming objectivity, but rather by reimagining it and by submitting it to a transformation. This considers that what is lost cannot simply be reconstructed, but needs to be imagined from the present. In Ensemble, this translates into different forms of recording, translation, and scoring movement.
Dates and timetable
From 12 Sep to 13 Nov 2026
Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg
Petites-Rames 22
1701 Fribourg
+41 26 323 23 51
