Yoonsuk Jung is a filmmaker whose work investigates how political and social realities are shaped by official records, collective memory, and public performance. His film Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (2017), for instance, follows the South Korean noise punk band Bamseom Pirates being targeted by censorship, using their story to examine the limits of free expression and the complex intersections of protest culture, media, and state surveillance. For Global Fascisms, Jung presents a newly commissioned video work titled STEAL (2025), developed through research at the South Korean National Assembly. Created during a period of political unrest, more explicitly in the period after the attempt to impose martial law—when public figures campaign wearing bulletproof vests and violence has returned to the political arena—STEAL investigates how democratic institutions always already are spaces of control and spectacle. Combining archival footage from parliamentary sessions with new recordings inside and around the Assembly, the work encourages viewers to consider what is shown, what is concealed, and what is staged. A second work by Jung, Tomorrow (2020), examines the overlap of objectification and industry, linking bodily aesthetics to fascist and capitalist logics of control. The two-channel video, filmed in a sex doll and a mannequin factory, traces how the female body is sculpted, sexualized, and perfected for display. Emerging from patriarchal visual culture, this manufactured bodily ideal reappears in fascist fantasies of control and fertility, shaped by pronatalist desire. Behind the perfected forms stand the workers, mostly women, whose repetitive, disciplined labour sustains the industry. Tomorrow reflects on how power is manufactured—in plastic, in silicone, through bodies made to serve—and how capitalist production thrives on desire, standardization, and the commodification of intimacy.

STEAL commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Yoonsuk Jung and HKW, 2025

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION: STEAL (2025), 1-channel video installation, colour, sound, c.20'; Tomorrow (2020), 2-channel video, colour, sound, 34'. Courtesy of the artist