HYENAZ Works: Critical Magic

  • Binaries

    Winner “Most Bizaare”, Berlin Music Video Awards 2016

    In Binaries, HYENAZ transmutes breath—the primal dyad of in/out—into a hyperventilating ritual for queer worldmaking. What begins as a rhythmic pulse escalates into a chaos magic crescendo: bodies and cameras spiral through absurdist pantomimes of “sacred/profane,” “curved/straight,” “hand/eye,” each binary fractured into flickering particles. The tension builds, breath by breath, until the breaking point—a gnostic rupture where intention blooms and viewers can send their desires for personal and political change into the universe.

    Scenes of ritualized absurdity performed by two sea-monster like creatures: frying an egg, drinking milk, pissing in a tub are diced into microscopic shards using the Jawa technique, a glitch alchemy HYENAZ learned from Tasman Richardson. These fragments syncopate with sound and pixel, stitching together a hallucinatory tapestry where meaning slips its seams. Stylist Yeorg Kronnagel drapes the performers in textures that blur grotesque and divine, while cinematographer Rilk Mob lenses the chaos through a prism of queered light, bending shadows into collaborators.

    This is critical magic as praxis: a refusal of fixed forms, a love letter to disintegration. Binaries invites you to breathe with its arrhythmia, to let your gaze stutter across its glitch-smeared syntax. There is no resolution here—only the fertile void where binaries combust, and from their ashes, something wilder stirs.

    Binaries is part of HYENAZ’s Critical Magic project, where performative rituals become sites of radical re-enchantment.

    CREDITS

    Lead ArtistHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ
    PerformersHYENAZ
    StylistYeorg Kronnagel
    CinematographerRilk Mob
    Video EditHYENAZ

  • Spectral Rite

    A collaboration between HYENAZ, Sylbee Kim & Nico Pelzer

    Dates

    27-31 August 2014MULTI-ARTS PROJECT II Annyeong! Hello!
    National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

    Through the aural and visual act of the procession, Spectral Rite explores the architectural condition and the institutional environment of MMCA Seoul. Berlin-based performance duo HYENAZ incarnate as androgynous celestial beings, beautiful monsters, hybrid street peddlers and warriors for justice. Their presence evokes remote yet acquainted spaces, archaic and future tenses, as they appear within the MMCA as familiar strangers.

    The procession is guided by an analytic approach to the architecture of MMCA Seoul, and implies contemplations around the destiny of a space which could rupture into another field of parallel time that is both history and future.

    HYENAZ presented four musical compositions with lyrics in Korean exclusively composed for Spectral Rite. Each station in the procession is connected by movement transitions and atmospherically sung language. Reacting to the condition of mobility during the procession, the geometry of each costume is embedded with a variety of inventive solutions for acoustic and digital sound experimentation. The pseudo-instruments recall shamanistic tools, weapons of war, futuristic media machines and recognizably mimic existing instruments.

    In Spectral Rite, the voice suggests a pre-linguistic phase of sound, and attempts to overcome language-centered systems as well as the impossibility of translation. The movement visualizes a yearning for a unified hybrid of gender, histories and spaces. Spectral Rite is a wedding of physical bodies and the architecture of the museum. As warriors, HYENAZ intend to prevail over apathy and daily complacency of consumerist and institutionalized city life.

    Credits

    DirectionSylbee Kim
    Performed byHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ with Nicolas Pelzer, Sylbee Kim
    LyricsSylbee Kim, HYENAZ, Nicolas Pelzer
    CostumesJuan Chamié (for EXIT)
    Styling, Objects and InstrumentsYeorg Kronnagel with Rilk Mob
    ProjectionSylbee Kim
    CoordinatorTaejun Kim
    DocumentationSylbee Kim, Seung-Bum Hong, Nico Pelzer
    Supported byKorean Cultural Center, Berlin; Mi-Hyun Park (Gayageum)