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Minha Park
쉐도우 플래닛 Shadow Planet | 2023 | 15’
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
Synopsis
Shadow Planet (2023) revisits the vast image collection of NASA’s Mars archives recorded from 2004 to 2023. On this desolate planet with no human presence, what are the rovers, drones, and satellites actually seeing—and what events are unfolding there? Over nearly two decades of intensive imaging, Mars was colonized by the cartographic gaze, inscribed with countless place names. From these immense images, created to perfectly reproduce and systematize Mars, Minha Park turns instead to the anomalies that interrupt the smoothness of map: blind spots, blanks, image glitches, and ghost-like dust storms. These ghostly storms, also called Dust Devils, continually produce blind zones in the observers’ cameras and generate blanks in the image data. The work proposes a hypothesis that a war of vision may be unfolding between Mars’s invisible inhabitants and the camera apparatus observing the planet. As a tactic, the blanks of this world may keep expanding—whether we want them to or not.
About the artist
Minha Park is an artist and filmmaker based in Seoul. Her practice explores the politics of image by observing how media technologies shape our sensory world in socio-cultural context. Her work centers on byproducts of media technologies that serve to summon entities or events beyond the limits of human perception. Her research-driven practice spans film, sound, and installation, merging documentary and fiction with speculative strategies. Park investigates sensory systems and residual narratives within media, science, and history, revealing latent memories and challenging dominant perceptions of technology, truth, and visibility. Her works have been exhibited and screened at venues such as: MMCA Seoul, Leeum Samsung Museum, Atelier Hermès-Foundation D’Entreprise Hermès (Seoul), LUX (London), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), among others.