Christine Sun Kim
Every Life Signs
May 19–August 21, 2022
Tony Cokes
Fragments, or just Moments
June 10–October 23, 2022
“A Modernity defining the social relations by formal categories.” —Tony Cokes, Some Munich Moments 1937–1972, 2022
Christine Sun Kim
May 19–August 21, 2022
Artist Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, US) explores how sound and language shape access and participation within societies, institutions, and infrastructures.
Living in a world privileging verbal and auditory communication, Kim translates voice and musicality into visual and physical modes of expression. In these conceptual compositions, the artist combines personal representation of American Sign Language (ASL) with written English, musical notation, and visual poetry to reveal unspoken patterns of behaviour.
Kim’s site-specific multimedia work Every Life Signs (2022) turns the middle hall of Haus der Kunst into a sensory and rhythmical score. Employing multiple enlarged and animated drawings that structure the floor surface, the artist visualises how numerals are integrated into American Sign Language and how the method of counting is applied to temporal and monetary units. Through the recurring collision between static written English terms and their animated depictions in American Sign Language, Kim draws attention to the grammatical properties of ASL, in which the localisation of the signing on different body parts changes its meaning.
Every Life Signs reflects on the rhythm of the everyday lives of Deaf people and the constant experience of repetition, duration and delay within interactions with a predominantly hearing environment. Simultaneously, Kim’s extensive floor score invites the audiences to envision a future that equally grants space to multiple forms of communication and realigns notions of informational exchange.
Curated by Elena Setzer.
Tony Cokes
June 10–October 23, 2022
Fragments, or just Moments marks the first solo show in Germany of the artist Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, US) and the first collaboration between Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München. Taking the historical connection between the two closely located exhibition sites as a point of departure, Cokes presents newly commissioned works that span both institutions and the public space in between. The new series, entitled “Some Munich Moments 1937–1972” (2022), traces the politics of two different visual and rhetoric regimes that have materialised within the shared history of both venues.
Since the early 1990s, Tony Cokes has explored the political impact of media and pop culture. Cokes’s fast-moving essay films often exclude representational imagery and combine found text fragments with pop music, stemming from different cultural sources and times. Combining word and song, Cokes alters conventional forms of perception, converting the act of reading and listening into a bodily and communal experience.
The exhibition Fragments, or just Moments is installed across the two locations, Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München, forming a dialogue between the institutions, their archives and Cokes’s work. At Haus der Kunst, the exhibition brings together selected audio-visual works from Tony Cokes’s three-decade-spanning oeuvre and sketches a fragmented chronology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Fragments, or just Moments charts Cokes’s ongoing investigation of discursive and socio-political continuities that are closely linked to specific historical moments.
Exhibition at Haus der Kunst: Curated by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer.
Exhibition at Kunstverein München: Curated by Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay and Gina Merz.
