Wednesday December 11, 7pm
Videos by Soun-Gui Kim
admission $6 – artist in person
Still from “Sans Nom” (Soun-Gui Kim, 1995) © courtesy of the artist
We are very pleased to welcome artist Soun-Gui Kim for a very rare screening of her video works including “Bonjour Nam-June-Paik II”, a 1984 performance of Kim with Nam-June Paik, and “John Cage, Empty Words” with Cage performing/reading his text composition in 1986 in Marseille, France. The Korean-born, French artist has been working with video and installation since the 1970s, and over the years has collaborated and performed not only with John Cage and Nam-June Paik, but also French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida.
Soun-Gui Kim is currently in the US for the opening of her solo exhibition “Soun-Gui Kim in dialogue with Cage, Derrida, and Nancy” at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Kim will be available for Q&A after the screening.
“[…] Soun-gui’s experiment is also an experiencing of the voyage through art itself, through this singular apparatus we call “art” and its recent history ; a passage until the other side, where the “artist” no longer achieves “a work of art” but performs something else, still to be named by us, if it is to be named at all. Such an experiment which is that of contemporary art as a whole, is made by Soun-gui in her very own way, as an experiencing of fading out. Each time, her time is one of dissolution, disappearance, evading or erasing. Of an angle closing up or the aperture being shuttered, of a sliding to the side, off screen or into the digital decomposition deep into the monitor or deep into the picture itself. Maps are cast into deep shadows, photographs become blurred, screens melt down, noises die away, figures thin out and the frog jumps off.” – Jean-Luc Nancy, from Experiencing Soun-Gui
“Soun-Gui Kim in dialogue with Cage, Derrida, and Nancy” at the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, PA) runs from December 6 through January 18, 2014. More info available at www.slought.org
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Soun-Gui Kim moved to Paris in 1971 after completing art studies at Seoul National University. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Adelaide, Australia; the Museum of Modern Art, Austria; the Museum of Contemporary Art Ars Aevi, Bosnia; Fukui International video Biennale, Fukui ; «Japan 87 Video T.V Festival», Tokyo, Japan ; DAAD gallery, Berlin and Kunsthaus, Hamburg ; the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Sonje Center, Seoul and the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea; the Centre George Pompidou and the Fondation Cartier in Paris; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, France; the San Diego Art Museum in California; and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.
Soun-Gui Kim works and lives in Paris.
Program
approx. 60 minutes
Songe d’un papillon (A Butterfly’s Dream)
video, 5 min 21 sec, 1992
Funeral ceremony of the well-known Korean buddhist monk Ja-Wun at the Hé-In temple, in Korea.
I-Hua
video, 3 min 31 sec,1980-1985
The artist performing archery as a meditative exercise in the Korean tradition of the I-Hua, “with the rhythm of a brush stroke”.
Sans nom (Without Name)
video, 2 min 40 sec,1995
A woman reading in deaf-mute sign language from the diary of another woman deported by the Japanese Army during the WWII.
Bonjour Nam-June-Paik II
video, 8 min, 1984
Parallel performance by Soun-Gui Kim and Nam-June Paik: each one writes a poem around a table covered with a mandala-colored Korean tissue evoking the video test pattern.
Ice Video Concert / Vide & O
video, 27 min 21sec, 1989
The video shows the installation “Ice Video” presented at Kunsthaus (Hamburg) in 1989: an ice TV monitor slowly melts turning into “Nothing”, or the time 0 of the video.
Etang de Vaccarès
video, 6 min 19 sec
GRE-GRE
video, 20 sec, 2013
Joyful, randomly processed landscape.
John Cage, Empty Words
video (excerpt), approx. 10 min, 1986
John Cage reading and singing his composition “Empty Words”.
Performed at La Vieille Charité, Marseille, during the festival “Video & Multimedia / Soun-Gui Kim and her Guests” in 1986.
Still from “GRE-GRE” (Soun-Gui Kim, 2013) © courtesy of the artist
