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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012 The event took place almost a year after a performance by the collective JocJonJosch titled Existere at TestBed1, an experimental art space in Battersea, and coincided with the publication of a limited edition artist’s book which sought to engage with the ideas raised by the performance – questions of eroticism, corporeality, collectivity and memory JocJonJosch had decided not to document the performance photographically, preferring to engage with its mnemonic and imagined remnants   Writers and artists were invited to contribute impressions, essays or artworks, in the hope that these would provide an alternative form of documentation to the photographic image What follows also forms part of this fallout, though the aim was to move beyond Existere and to situate some of JocJonJosch’s strategies within the broader context of performance art, particularly in relation to the problems encountered in its documentation The conversation has been edited but a full transcript can be found here   A brief introductory note on the speakers Jo Melvin is a curator, art historian and lecturer Recently she has collaborated on the Barry Flanagan exhibition at Tate Britain (2011) and worked on the important retrospective of the polish artist Tadeusz Kantor at the Sainsbury Centre in East Anglia (2009) David Gothard is a theatre director and former artistic director of Riverside Studios, where he worked closely with Joan Miró, Shuji Tereyama, Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor, among others John James is a poet and collector His Collected Poems were published by Salt Publishing in 2002 His most recent collection, Cloud Breaking Sun, was published by Oystercatcher Press in 2012 Rye Dag Holmboe is a writer and PhD candidate at University College, London   RYE DAG HOLMBOE: I wanted to start the discussion with an idea that leads on from Existere Jo, I was wondering if you could talk a little about the strategy JocJonJosch deployed, particularly in relation to the question of memory, and discuss how it may relate to  documenting performance art more generally Perhaps you could give us some precedents to the collective’s ideas?   JO MELVIN: Yes Something that I