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KEWENIG is pleased to announce Room #2 with an installation of three Bottari (2017) by Kimsooja. The installation is part of KEWENIG’s new exhibition format '12 Rooms', a monthly rotating artist programme in the enclosed room between the gallery and the adjacent building, at the entrance of the gallery’s elevator shaft. Each month a new installation by a selected artist will be on display.
The conceptual artist Kimsooja (born in 1957 in Daegu, South Korea) lives in New York and Seoul. For more than thirty years, she has dedicated her oeuvre to the themes of migration, cosmopolitanism and transculturalism in an increasingly globalised yet destructive world. Her conceptual multimedia works evolve from her position as a painter, from her early sewn works to objects, performances, sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Focusing on existential questions and the human condition, Kimsooja has been conceptualising women’s domestic daily life activities in the context of contemporary art. Her exploration of dislocation often makes use of Bottari (Korean for 'bundles'), traditional Korean bedcovers made into bundles by women of all classes, which wrap and protect one’s most important belongings during transit, often when a native place had to be left behind. Homeland, for Kimsooja, 'is no topographically definable place but a state of consciousness and belonging.' The artist first tied together Bottari in 1992, during her time as artist-in-residence at the MoMA PS1; since then, she has repeatedly taken them up anew as an artistic evolution and as a signature, each time in a site-specific manner in response to the personal and social condition around her. These three Bottari stem from an installation that Kimsooja made especially for her solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz and were subsequently shown at Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany.
Kimsooja has represented South Korea at the 24th São Paulo Biennial in 1998 and the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She was recently honoured with the Ho-Am Prize (2015), the Chevalier of the Order of Arts (2017), and the Asia Society Arts Award (2017). Her work has been internationally exhibited at numerous renowned museums such as the MoMA PS1, New York (2001); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2012); Vancouver Art Gallery (2013); Guggenheim Bilbao (2015); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2015); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2010, 2016/17), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2017), and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2018) amongst many others. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, England, will dedicate a solo show to the artist opening in March 2019.
Press release courtesy KEWENIG.
