Pizzas for the People

Join us for an evening of film and pizza!

We will be screening Hwang Kim's "Pizzas for the People" (2013) and the documentary video of the making of the film. Related to the video we will organise our own special pizza party.

North Korea is one of the most culturally isolated countries in the world. To protect the national identity from what is viewed as potentially corrupting outside influences, the government tightly controls all media. However, when recently deceased leader Kim Jong-il decided that the availability of pizza to the wealthy political elite was of national importance, it led to the opening of the first ever North Korean pizzeria. In response, artist Hwang Kim arranged for Chinese smugglers to smuggle an instructional DVD for making pizza into North Korea (since DVD players are widely found in North Korean homes), where it would be regarded as illegal propaganda. Pizzas for the People is a critical exploration of how design can playfully contribute and impact on a social and cultural level, subtly challenging an ideological status quo.

Hwang Kim is a designer who has been working on the boundary of applied design, advocating design that resists the authority and restraint of a coherent techno-global system. Focusing on his interdisciplinary activities, he has been working on the coarseness of repressive logic, the image of senselessness, and comedy in reality.

Many of his works, such as CCTV Chandelier in which he walked through the streets wearing 360-degree CCTVs and Pizzas for the People in which he smuggled cooking lessons for pizza to North Korea, have been exhibited, performed, and screened in a number of places including the Barbican Center in London, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Festival B:om Seoul, as well as Japan, China, Macau, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Egypt, and South Africa. Currently, Kim works as an assistant professor at the Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)