Kimsooja

KIMSOOJA

September 30 – December 17, 2006

Curator: David Neuman, Tessa Praun

Kimsooja works with traditional Korean textiles and second-hand clothes. She spreads, folds, ties and hangs bed sheets full of history and cultural symbolism. The sheets bear signs of life – we are born, sleep, make love, dream, suffer and die on sheets. Existence and communication in contemporary society, and the nomadic rather than rooted life, are central themes in her work. She compares herself to a needle, holding the world together with her observations.

At Magasin 3 she has parked a truck from 1938 with the back piled with ‘bottari’ – cloth bundles used for storing personal belongings. A similar truck appears in the video work Cities on the Move: sitting on the pile of bundles, the artist travels to all the places in Korea where she has lived and which hold memories for her. Kimsooja is always present in her own video works, leading us into the works and into her art. In one of the exhibition spaces Kimsooja has hung colorful sheets that turn into swaying pictorial panels in the light draft. To the accompaniment of Tibetan monk chant, visitors can wander among the rows of bedclothes in the installation A Laundry Woman.

Kimsooja combines elements from Korean culture with contemporary artistic expressions, to create colorful installations and poetic performance-based video works. The exhibition at Magasin 3 is her first solo exhibition in the Nordic region, and presents works ranging from the mid-1990s to today.

Programme:

On Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 6 pm, Uta Lauer, professor of East Asian Art at Stockholm University will give a lecture, examining Kimsooja’s textiles and materials from a cultural perspective. Please observe that the lecture will be held in English.

Publication:

A richly illustrated catalogue is produced for the exhibition, with an essay by Doris von Drathen, art historian and art critic based in Paris, and a conversation between Kimsooja and Tessa Praun, assistant curator at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.

About the artist:

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, Korea. Since the late 1990s, she has been living and working in New York. Her works have been featured by museums and galleries all over the world and she has participated in biennials such as those in Kwangju and Venice. Earlier this year, she exhibited at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and also created a site-specific work there for the city’s prestigious and recently reconstructed opera house, La Fenice. This spring and summer, Kimsooja also presented a new work at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, produced in co-operation with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

For press inquiries please contact:

Sannah Söderman, exhibition coordinator: soderman@magasin3.com, 08-545 680 40.