The pieces by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) operate within the realms of healing, belonging, and historical reparation as they dissect Eurocentric systems of categorization and racialization, as well as their penetration into various levels of contemporary Western society. Through works in various media, such as video, writing, immersive installations, and painting, the artist creates kinds of spiritual evocations that communicate the immaterial, revealing political and memory dimensions often overshadowed by coloniality. In Dismemberment (2024), European Enlightenment and modern ideals are personified in the figure of a gallery owner, called Europa, portrayed by the German actress Susanne Sachsse. Her behavior and speech astutely expose the violences that structure these principles. Chang, in the work, represents an artist setting up the installation in the gallery of Sachsse’s character, and their interactions illustrate the normalization of the persistent racialization within European society that upholds colonial hierarchies.
The exposed abuse and imbalances generated by this interaction culminates in a ritual where the accompanying deities of the artist reveal themselves in the exhibition space, and the Korean gods Daesin Halmeoni, the Great Spirit Grandmother, and Sansin, the Mountain God, perform a healing through Chang on the body of the sick Europe. The ritual is inspired by the traditional Ssitgimgut practice, in which a person is dismantled by the gods, and what no longer serves them – such as greed, arrogance, abuse, or illness – is removed, leading to rebirth. Dismemberment works along the invisible lines connecting ancestry and spirituality to Chang’s artistic production, but also those connecting individuals immersed in the process of displacement from their original territories to Europe. Texts and images overlap in an anamnesis of the genealogy and settlement of generations of women living under European hegemony, pronouncing a possible end to the cycles of violence that afflict these bodies.
Rather than centering on displacement or the search for spirituality, Dismemberment presents a shamanic and political allegory in which Enlightenment ideals – long used to justify colonial domination – are embodied in the figure of the gallerist Europa, representing Europe itself. The work shifts the ethnographic gaze away from those who have been racialized, and instead examines the structures and mentalities of those who racialize. The installation comprises two interconnected spaces: a film room and a room that mirrors the gallery depicted on screen. This space acts both as an art gallery – playing with the ethnographic gaze – and as a ritual room where viewers encounter Korean shamanic art objects such as a large fan, paintings, phallic forms, and paper prayers, creating a ritual environment that blurs fiction and ceremony. Through this meta-structure and the culminating Ssitgimgut ritual – in which sick Europa is dismembered and cleansed by ancestral spirits – the work enacts a symbolic healing of the colonial body and proposes the possibility of its transformation.