Four Months, Four Million Light Years takes the colonial print “Shaman or Devils Priest from the Tungus” by the Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen as the starting point for a spiritual journey through time. The seventeenth-century print is the first Western image of a shaman. This caricatural image was later used by missionaries to marginalize shamanism. It is also the start of racialized and infantilizing descriptions of Asian people by white Europeans. Through text, film footage, watercolours and drum playing, artist Sara Sejin Chang presents a story about those who were forced to leave their families. The “Four Months” in the title refer to the time it took to make a Korean child available for the lucrative transracial adoption industry. An industry that still lives off the same imagery as that of 300 years ago. As the artist reconnected with her culture, shamans told her that if she had not been forced to migrate, she herself would have become a shaman. They help to create a ritual that pays homage to those who have been cut off from their mothers, fathers, family, ancestors, land, culture and spirits.

Confronted with the SARS-CoV-2 crisis, we had to cancel this project