An installation by Nari Baker, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays through Sept. 16, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E., Seattle; free; Baker will discuss her installation at 7 p.m. Aug. 19 at the gallery (206-634-0919 or www.jackstraw.org).

The six rotary telephones are veritable antiques. But the voices you hear when you pick them up couldn’t be more contemporary or urgent.

The telephones are part of Seattle artist Nari Baker’s installation “Talking to Ghosts: Waiting in the River Between Worlds,” in which she explores the thoughts and wishes of Korean adoptees who have never reconnected with their Korean birth-

parents but often speculate or fantasize about doing so.

Each telephone has a different story to tell — or actually two different stories, as there are a dozen audio letters altogether. As you listen to them in Jack Straw New Media Gallery, you can’t help feeling that you’re eavesdropping. The sense of illicitly overhearing someone’s deepest personal issues being voiced is heightened by the telephones’ surroundings: a dimly lit room hung with banners on which photographs and Korean characters are projected.

Baker recorded these inquiries and outpourings in South Korea at locales that figure in the speakers’ adoption records: hospitals, homes for single mothers, a streetside doorstep where you can hear traffic and passers-by in the background.

While their stories vary in specifics, one phrase recurs in almost all of them: “I have a lot of questions.”

Some speakers are flip (“Hello stranger who once gave birth to me”) while others are more plaintive or sorrowful. Some are wary of reconnection, stressing that they’re happily American or European now, rather than Korean in their cultural outlook.

Others seem genuinely paralyzed in their lives: “It’s very difficult to figure how much time to spend dealing with feelings from the past versus moving on.”

A few have practical questions: Were they saved from certain poverty by being given away? Was abortion not legal in South Korea at the time they were born?

While some are resentful of these question marks in their lives, others try strenuously, if awkwardly, to avoid any note of accusation in their words. Almost all of them pull you in with their stories, and it’s easy to spend an hour or more just going from telephone to telephone, following one narrative after another.

Baker’s formal setting — with its banners, slide projections and neat arrangement of telephones — lends a welcome structure to the uncertain and sometimes highly conflicted feelings being expressed, making “Talking to Ghosts” an art installation that doesn’t just have a striking concept but some deeply human content.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com