Christine Sun Kim: Goethe-Institut x Somerset House Studios Residency | Jan – Apr 2023
Multidisciplinary artist Christine Sun Kim has joined the Somerset House Studios community for a three month-long residency programme in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London.
Christine Sun Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humour are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video and large-scale murals, Kim explores her relationship to spoken languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large.
Christine’s residency will conclude with the presentation of a newly commissioned work, as part of the series Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy.
This residency is presented with the support of Goethe-Institut London as part of the Goethe-Institut x Somerset House Studios residency.
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. It promotes knowledge of the German language abroad, fosters international cultural cooperation, and conveys a comprehensive image of Germany with 158 locations in 98 countries worldwide. The Goethe-Institut’s cultural programme brings a worldwide perspective to contemporary discourse in arts and society. It aims to strengthen intercultural dialogue and a global civil society through residencies, workshops, talks, and symposia. www.goethe.de/uk
Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy | Feb – Mar 2023
Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy is a returning series focusing on individual and collective health and wellbeing through a programme of newly commissioned artworks, films, workshops, and conversations. The focus of this year surrounds disability justice and artists who engage with the space of health and care which include: Jamila Prowse, bare minimum collective and Djofray Makumbu as well as Christine Sun Kim.
Tackling the wellness trends and the mythology of the ‘good body’ and its interconnectedness with capitalism, Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy (HF,UH) seeks to explore its perceived binary opposite – ‘sickness’. HF,UH aims to explore an inclusive framework of existence for all via the voices who encounter systemic oppression and stigmatisation around disability, chronic illness and mental health.
The series asks how can we imagine and shape a future where meaningful care and resistance are thought of as standard. Where all bodies and lives are centred – not existing in ‘othered’ relation to white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist culture – but are represented and celebrated on their own terms?
This programme was curated in collaboration with Jamila Prowse.
Film screening: Moving Towards Disability Inclusivity | 20 Feb – 12 Mar 2023 | 10.00 - 18.00 daily | G18 | FREE
Artist and writer Jamila Prowse programmes a three-week film installation at Somerset House Studios as part of Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy, featuring works from Leah Clements, Kyla Harris and Lou Macnamara, Carolyn Lazard, Djofray Makumbu and Lizzy Rose.
Moving image continues to champion and visualise the lived individual and collective experience of sickness and disability which often start from the self. In these films, we encounter intimate and vulnerable moments of living, and the artists’ reflections on crip life in ways that express not just the challenges, but also disability pride. Carolyn Lazard’s Crip Time engages in the invisible, additional labour that comes with sickness, and in Djofray Makumbu short titled Cover, he creates an animation of interviews he conducted with a group of young people with disabilities allowing them to tell their own stories. In It’s Personal, artists and friend duo Kyla Harris and Lou Macnamara give a refreshing personal perspective on the global care crisis. Leah Clements’s Collapse is a film work formed from the voices of people who fall asleep in times of stress, anxiety, or danger and Lizzy Rose’s mystical Journey to film a ruin links Rose’s key interests: chronic illness, communities as bodies and overlooked spaces.
Panel Discussion: Cripping the Art World | 28 Feb 2023 | 18.45 - 20.30 | Lancaster Rooms | £8.00 full price, £6.00 concessions
Disabled artistic communities are finding their own creative interventions into cripping the art world. Whether identifying new ways of supporting artists through curation, helping people process and reclaim their mental health through photography, or envisioning open tools and resources that raise awareness about chronic illness. All of which serves as an act of reclaiming the term crip by disabled communities where the word refers to a desire to build disability inclusivity into society.
In this panel discussion, disabled artist and writer Jamila Prowse is joined by curator and writer Iarlaith Ni Fheorais, artist filmmaker, producer and writer Jameisha Prescod and artist and writer Marie Smith.
Performance Evening: The sick/crip/resting/lazy/interdependent body | 09 Mar 2023 |18.45 - 21.00 | Lancaster Rooms | £10.00 full price, £8.00 concessions
This evening of performances and readings asks us to reset, reconsider our bodies, our health, and take some much-needed time to rest. With performances exploring the need to prioritise rest, laziness and the interdependence of sick/crip friendships and communities from bare minimum collective and Jamila Prowse and readings around sickness and the body from Clay AD, Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Alice Hattrick; we ask you to step outside of time for a moment, and resist the white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist culture which is making us all sick.
The performance piece Boss Bitch Malfunction presented by Jamila Prowse will see her share her private emails in an attempt to release her shame of pulling out of jobs and commissions; resisting the pressures of consumerism, fear of not making rent and toxic girl boss culture.
Christine Sun Kim: Edges of Sign Language | Private View: 30 Mar 2023 | 31 Mar – 21 May 2023 | 10.00 - 18.00 daily | Gallery 31 | FREE
Christine Sun Kim will present her new commission Edges of Sign Language in the intimate Gallery 31 space. Expanding on her practice of drawing with charcoal by designing and building shaped canvases that represent the limitations of physical space through an American Sign Language lens. Kim seeks to visualise the tensions between notations, marks, shapes and, most importantly, edges.
Commissioned by Somerset House in collaboration with Goethe-Institut London.
Hyper Functional Ultra Healthy x Grounding Practice | 06 – 20 Apr 2023
Grounding Practice, Somerset House Studios' rolling programme of artist-led workshops and meet-ups, continues with a series of three participatory sessions to coincide with Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy. Sharing the programme's focus on disability justice, health and care, the events will see contributions from artists Kaiya Waerea and Rudy Loewe with more to be announced. The dates include 06, 13 and 20 April 2023.
Grounding Practice: Canal Studies with Harun Morrison | 02 Mar – 02 Apr 2023 | £8 - £30 | Tickets Here
Artist and writer Harun Morrison convenes a series of discussions, walks and screenings to consider the London canal system. Thinking of the canals as a material network, or mesh, canal studies offers ways of thinking about contemporary London housing politics, the current energy crisis and histories of industrial labour through the waterways.
Music and Sound residency artists
This residency is a new 15-month programme developed to support music and sound artists who are interested in experimenting and curious about working across other disciplines. The residency is shaped with mentorship from Studios residents Gaika, Nkisi and Paul Purgas
The successful artists are: Lord Tusk, a sound curator, self-defence instructor and multidisciplinary artist who plans on developing a project exploring a personal photographic archive formed of contributions from family, friends and himself; an experimental reflection on place, people, time and memory, Ruth Hughes, whose practice explores relationships between British industrial histories and contemporary sound cultures, particularly those of her hometown Sunderland in the north-east of England, and Zein Majal, a Jordanian-Palestinian artist based in London whose interest revolves around the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community. Her work touches on a post-colonial and globalised Middle East, her primary area of interest is the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community.
UAL Creative Computing Institute x Somerset House Studios Experimental Technology Fellowship
Somerset House Studios has partnered with UAL Creative Computing Institute (CCI) to launch a new Experimental Technology Fellowship offering a unique development and commission opportunity for artists looking to incorporate new technology within their work.
Selected following a nomination process involving artists, curators, academics and cultural professionals, Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen will join the community and receive practical and technological support over a five-month residency across both sites, developing a new experimental work which will be presented on Channel, Somerset House’s new curated online platform for art, ideas and the creative process, in September 2023.
Click and Collect: Show me your dataset | 18 Feb 2023 | £10.00 | Tickets Here
The all-day event reflects upon the current narrative surrounding AI and through discussions, performance, a workshop, and screenings of the short films created on the PATH AI Residency Programme, audiences are urged to question and re-write their understanding of AI. Questioning its apparent ‘neutrality’; the quantum leap in speed in the development of machine learning models in 2022 and what that holds for future development; imagining futures in which communication and collaboration with AI creates a more sustainable and caring AI. The programme includes a workshop in which participants experiment with building atypical datasets to show biases in the current models.
Presented by Somerset House in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute and UAL Creative Computing Institute.
14.00 – 16.30 | A·kin: Aarati Akkapeddi | Workshop
Artist, coder and educator Aarati Akkapeddi will be running a workshop that looks at Tamil studio photographs and different ways to read and organise them. Participants are encouraged to bring personal photographs, especially those taken in Tamil photography studios, to be collectively grouped with photographs from the stars.archive (Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society). Akkapeddi will share different approaches to image categorisation using both computer programmes and more personal points of view. The artist will then show how to digitally average similar images into a single composite image.
The workshop builds on Aarati’s current exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, called ‘A·kin’. Through the stars.archive and Aarati’s own family photographs, the exhibition asks what computers ‘see’ when looking at family albums. Are algorithmic models able to grasp the cultural traces of a community when looking at their archive of photographs?
This workshop is presented in partnership with The Photographer’s Gallery.
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