When I was Done Dying, Titanik

When I Was Done Dying is a quiet manifesto by Shia Conlon and Minjee Hwang Kim on what happens when the heavy days and nights are more or less over; for when you realise the nightmare isn’t real, you can just get up, shake it off.

Both Conlon and Kim come from religious backgrounds: Conlon from Irish Catholic and Kim from Korean Buddhist. Over the past years, they have worked both separately and collaboratively on projects exploring faith, trauma, and growing up in patriarchal landscapes. For When I Was Done Dying, Conlon and Kim further their collaborative practice by traversing non-linear time, dreaming, and death.

Shia Conlon explores this from a queer-transgender perspective, creating a series of sculptural interventions. These works act as portals into early childhood and heavy teenage days to conjure moments where one might have first encountered power structures such as religion, the family, gender, or sexuality. Conlon proposes that as victims, survivors, or simply humans, we all experience moments where something overpowers us. We might need to rest, surrender, or shut down. These portals aim to ask; what do we do when we’re ready to reemerge? Where can we go from there?

Minjee Hwang Kim revisits the disquieting memories of both collective and personal trauma through somewhat childlike snippets: sinking ferry, collapsing bridge, crumbling family. Those moments where people have died and cried are not explicitly present in the work. Instead, they exist as shadows and fogs, the immaterial encircling us, perhaps to haunt, perhaps to remind ourselves of the fragility of life and to keep us company on this journey alone.

Shia Conlon is an artist and writer currently based in Helsinki. Much of his work has been centered around marginalized voices and about growing up in the landscape of working class Catholic Ireland. His art has been written about in PHMuseum, The New York Times, i-D, Dazed and Confused and Huffington Post UK & US. His writing has been published in Mustekala, NO NIIN, Astra, Zelda, Pilot Press Modern Queer Poets, 14poems & Oroboro. His current research is focused on non-linear time, trans representation, archives, language, and memory.

Minjee Hwang Kim is a visual artist from Seoul based in Helsinki. Her artistic interest lies in placement in both the physical and psychological sense. In her works, she explores looping time, warping space, and contradictions of belonging between the Buddhist-circular universe and the Christian-linear universe. Kim’s works have been shown in multiple solo and group shows in Helsinki, Seoul, New York, and online platforms. Kim holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Korea National University of Arts and an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki.

The work of artists has been supported by Kone Foundation, Taike, Finnish Cultural Foundation, The Paulo Foundation and Finnish Art Society.

Image credit: Johanna Naukkarinen

Image Captions:

Heavy Night, hand embroidered sequins on cotton with the help of Alice Tien Tran and HAMU, 253*290 cm, 2022

Nightmare Cocoon, wire, plastic, paper, watercolor, acrylic, varnish, dimension variable, 2022