Vowels Are Connected to the Holes of the Body
(2024)

The historical transformation of non-human agents into objects has turned turtles shells into painting frames and uses ground teeth to decorate chairs. How can these objectified, commodified, anonymized and domesticated bodies take back their agency?

Using vowels as a freed sound, this work by Aram Lee attempts to blend and remove the boundaries in the relation subject/object and the non-human/human. The main video in this presentations is a still life scene from a painting by Willem Kalf rendered in a 3D where the movement of the objects, light, and camera are generated in response to an algorithmic sound. The sound algorithm was designed by Aram and is a 7 vowelled system of her voice in her native language, Korean. The vowels travels the body’s orifices following from the lungs, diaphragm, kidneys, anus, genitals and heart to the inside of objects in the collection of the Museum, to turbulence in the body and so on.