“Parkour” originated from the word parcours, meaning “journey” in French. It is an athletic training discipline that involves overcoming various obstacles in urban or natural environments with the human body. Parkour continuously creates movements that escape conventional rules in ordinary spaces. The video explores the possibilities of physical performance through the movement and dynamics of the extreme sport of parkour. Through repetitive physical training under extreme conditions that could plausibly damage the body, parkour is shown as the act of discovering the point of unity between the body and mind and questioning the self with a physical body. The perspective of the camera attached to the body involving speedy physical movements such as jumps or falls resembles that of online games.
Parkour suggests to escape the algorithms of parkour movements distributed through the internet, which simplify the diversity of parkour and reduce it into uniform data as a sport. It attempts to capture movements as opening the possibility of expanding and performing the bodily experience.
Hyojae KIM (김효재) is an artist based in Korea, USA, and France. Kim’s project is a reflection on her research into parkour, an athletic training and sport aiming to overcome obstacles found in cities or nature, as well as the questions about how future generations will survive under climate change without the help of technology. Kim’s solo exhibitions include No Trace (2022, Elephantspace, Seoul) and Default (2019, OS, Seoul), and she participated in the Frieze Film Seoul 2023 (2023, Insa Art Space, Seoul), Flop: A Dialectic of Rules and Fouls (2023, Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul), Right to Mother (2023, Hessel Museum of Art, New York), Shift (2022, NARS Foundation, New York), Set Up Your Profiles (2021, Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul), and Follow, Flow, Feed (2020, ARKO Art Center, Seoul).
