In this newly-commissioned audio-visual work by Bona Park, The Circular Ruins, a girl knocks, tickles, caresses, scratches, and rubs on the ruins of two centuries-old Buddhist temples just outside of Seoul, South Korea. Throughout the work, we never see a full view of the scene, instead, we experience the ruins through the sensations and movements of the girl whose actions wake the site and its long-held memories.

She bounces back and forth between past, present, and future in the ruins. With its focus on intimate and bodily sounds, the work references ASMR, the sensory phenomenon where a trigger – or combination of triggers – creates a cascade of gentle tingling from the scalp, and suggests an alternative, more tactile ways of connecting with our histories.

Single-channel HD video, colour, sound,
duration 13 minutes 2 seconds