Goethe-Institut x Somerset House Studios Residency 2023

January – April 2023

Multidisciplinary artist Christine Sun Kim joined the Somerset House Studios community for a three month-long international residency programme in collaboration with Goethe-Institut London.

Somerset House Studios continued their collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London to establish this international artist residency programme to support a Germany-based artist working at the intersection of music, art and technology.

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 humor 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 concluded with the presentation of a new work commissioned in collaboration with Goethe-Institut London, as part of the recurring programme, Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy, a dynamic series that considers individual and collective health and wellbeing. The programme returned in February 2023 with a focus on disability justice and artists who engage with the space of health and care.

Undoing the mythology of the ‘good body’ and the histories of self-reliance perpetuated by ‘wellness’ in its contemporary configuration as a capitalist construct, Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy seeks to explore its perceived binary opposite – ‘sickness’ – as a way to propose an inclusive framework of existence for all, whilst prioritising those whose experience of sickness is not temporary, and who encounter systemic oppression and stigmatisation for mental health issues and physical illness. 
 

Commissioned by Somerset House, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut London

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Header image by Max Creasy