Yen Noh is an artist, writer, and educator whose practice engages with artistic and social aesthetic pedagogy. Her research has so far been on varied modes of linguistic and paralinguistic performativity as a way to challenge the cyclical violence of racialized and gendered identity and its (re)presentation. Throughout, she is concerned with possibilities of language that can embody the “poethics” of the unspeakable beyond linguistic norms and without reclaiming subjectivity. Noh currently explores illness as a pedagogical method and practice as part of the process of her own recovery. By drawing out the relationship between displacement and disability (more specifically mental illness but not exclusively), she is interested in possibilities for a radical unsettlement of the self, through which extraordinary social relations can be opened up. Noh participated in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 2021-2022.

Research description

Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused concerns illness as a practice. By refusing illness as an individuated notion of survival and undoing its cultural stigmas, it engages illness as a means for an artistic and social aesthetic pedagogy. In doing so, Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused explores the suffering body’s potential to becomes a conduit for the emergence of many-other-bodies. In other words, being ill is no longer a threat, instead an opening to break away from the seemingly solid boundaries of what we call “body.” The cultural pain of body and psyche marked by dispossession and displacement transposes into “wound, liquid, dust,” as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes in Dictee. While a diseuse(d), diseased, and disused body represents different histories of violence engendered by capitalist patriarchy and colonial imperialism, it carries with it a potentiality of transmutation. The body in continual processes of pain has a possibility for undoing the alchemy of that violence and bearing extraordinary social relations of humans and non-humans. Capitalized modern medical system in which individuation and compartmentalization are key fails to do justice to the body of the oppressed. In this regard, being ill can be a social project and form of resistance. One of the key elements of the research is what I call a social somatic practice. It explores illness as a Lebenspraxis in material, linguistic, and social terms. It draws on the contention that recovery can be communal, and illness can be thought and sensed collectively.