Won Ju Lim

Self-Annihilation, Act II

March 30th thru May 4th, 2024

Once upon a time, witchcraft and magic were real things, real not only as beliefs sincerely held by premodern people, but also as potent influences on their lives and fortunes. Curses and blessings played a powerful role in sickness and health through their ability to subvert or support the body’s functioning due to the psyche’s intimate connection with soma. A form of what might be called psycholinguistic programming, spells could trigger instinctual responses as well as cultural expectations to promote illness or healing, depending on the emotional valiance of the words, vocalizations, and accompanying expressions and gestures. Similarly, gazing into a mirror, scrying, was used to identify thieves, locate lost objects, and predict marriage partners because of its ability to induce trance states in which unconscious knowledge was manifested as images discerned in the reflective surface. “Every village has its witch, and every district has its healer,” held a Danish proverb, reflecting the ubiquity of these beliefs, practices, and practitioners in premodern Europe, America, and much of the rest of the world.

That was then, of course, and now, since the 1800s, we moderns no longer
indulge such beliefs. Or, rather, we indulge them as fantasies and parodies, metaphors and allegories, vestiges of childhood both societal and personal, shadows of what we know to be real. Frankenstein exposed who the real monsters in this world are; the Adams Family turned bourgeois life on its head; “Bewitched” created a proto-feminist reality in which Samantha Stevens had to deny and suppress her extraordinary powers to preserve her husband Darren’s status as breadwinner and protect his fragile ego. Doddering Aunt Clara provided comic relief with miscast spells whose errant outcomes created magical messes that Samantha had to fix by surreptitiously utilizing further magic to clean them up before they revealed the supernatural reality behind the facade of normalcy in the Stevens’ household.

Drawing on a selection of Aunt Clara’s spells, Won Ju Lim’s installation Self
Annihilation, Act II at council_st juxtaposes the printed text of the spells – in some cases clearly laid out, in other cases jumbled one on top of the other – a glossolalial soundscape mixing Aunt Clara’s often nonsensical utterances and a variety of self-consciously pre-verbal experimental and avant garde musical selections, and mirrors set up to produce a mix of straightforward and infinitely regressing reflections, to explore the effects of words, prosody, and reflective surfaces on mind and body. Part of her ongoing exploration of the show Bewitched, in this installation Lim reaches beyond the socio-cultural implications of the sitcom to bring together elements that echo the visceral impact of primal magical experiences, real magic.

- Edward Bever, Ph.D., The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe