OTTAWA, CANADA.- The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography presents two exhibitions on the theme of identity, Jin-me Yoon: Unbidden and Persona: From the Collection, at the National Gallery of Canada from 1 December 2006, to 9 April 2007.

"These exhibitions deal with a very fertile theme: through imaginative staging, the artists re-create themselves in relation to contemporary society, to project a new reality," commented Martha Hanna, Director of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. "Jin-me Yoon uses the contemporary media of video and photography to reflect on memory, violence and fear. Persona highlights significant works from the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography's extensive collection that explore themes of identity."

Jin-me Yoon: Unbidden - Vancouver artist Jin-me Yoon's exhibition explores the relationship between memory, identity and place. "Unbidden" refers to the way images and memories surface involuntarily in the consciousness. The installation uses video and photographs to bring out universal themes of movement and migration, diaspora and displacement, through war and exile. Examining her own roots, she alludes to the Korean War and the ever-present military tension between North and South, but the works, with evocative titles like "Jungle-Swamp" and "Underbrush", were in fact produced in Kamloops, British Columbia.

The theme of war is explicit in the staged photographs that conjure up the drama of children's games and war movies. It is difficult to know whether these images, so familiar because of the media, recall real events or whether they appear from what our collective imagination now identifies as war. As she peels back the layers of meaning, Yoon addresses the ambient fear that informs much of post 9/11 life.

The unconscious, memory, identity and place are important themes for this artist who, in 1991, created a work entitled Souvenirs of the Self composed of photographs of herself standing rigidly, with no facial expression in a variety of tourist spots in western Canada.

The exhibition Jin-me Yoon: Unbidden is organized by guest curator Susan Edelstein and produced and circulated by the Kamloops Art Gallery.