BUSY DAYS with Christine Sun Kim

BUSY DAYS with Christine Sun Kim stages five artistic interventions throughout Amsterdam (and beyond). It presents a concise selection of works by the American artist Christine Sun Kim that explores the medium of sound through technology, performance and drawing. Each of these interventions concerns a particular medium, duration and social context, such as a nightclub, a radio station or an office hallway, and highlights Kim’s singular relationship with spoken languages and her aural environment.

The project features distinctive ways in which Christine Sun Kim understands the concepts of sound and listening. This understanding has been determined by her being deaf since birth. Kim, however, prefers people to focus on the communication aspects of her work, instead of letting deafness be the driving force behind it. By doing this, she challenges widely excepted cultural ideas about the human voice as a predominantly sonic force, or sound as something that can only be experienced through audition.

To underscore the multifaceted ways in which the artist comprehends sound, BUSY DAYS with Christine Sun Kim consists of a wide range of strategies of intervention:

–Interview: an interview with Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader 
Location: Red Light Radio
Time: Friday, May 5, 2–3pm
Listen to the broadcast on redlightradio.net

–Lautplan: a lecture-performance by Christine Sun Kim
Location: Cafeteria, Broedplaats Lely, Schipluidenlaan 12, Amsterdam
Time: Saturday, May 6, 5–6pm

–Available Spaces: presentation of two series of drawings by Christine Sun Kim*
Location: Hallway to De Appel (thinks), Broedplaats Lely, Schipluidenlaan 12, Amsterdam
Time: May 6–August 20, Tuesday–Saturday 12–6pm

–Close Readings: presentation of Close Readings video-installation by Christine Sun Kim and Classified Digits video by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader
Location: De School, Dr Jan van Breemenstraat 1 - 3, Amsterdam
Time: June 8–July 9, Tuesday–Saturday, 12–10pm, and during club nights

–Busy Day: radio broadcast by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader
Location: Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee
Time: July 7, 12am–July 8, 12am
Listen to the broadcast on jajajaneeneenee.com

Taken together, these five interventions provide tools to comprehend some of the inquisitive ways in which Christine Sun Kim explores sound and what she calls “the politics of listening.” BUSY DAYS with Christine Sun Kim thus highlights the artist’s dedication to always playfully break the rules, especially when it concerns the questioning of culturally conditioned hearing practices or the ways in which we are habituated to experience sound, which is, according to the artist, “much more about an idea than about sound itself.”

BUSY DAYS with Christine Sun Kim is supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Mondriaan Fund and Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Christine Sun Kim is represented by Carroll / Fletcher, London.

*FOOTNOTES #1: Giuseppe Chiari

FOOTNOTES is a new, recurring exhibition format at De Appel. Its aim is to build upon, comment or deconstruct a motive from the main exhibition from within De Appel Archive or from an historical perspective. This FOOTNOTES presentation of a visual score by Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007), which was discovered (again) in De Appel Archive, balances off Christine Sun Kim’s intricate visual representations of sound through drawing.