Discussion with Eunsong Kim
@ THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
5811 S Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Sunday, October 23rd, from 3PM - 2PM
On view through Sunday, November 6th
Cobb Hall 3rd Floor, Film Studies Center, Room 307
Eunsong Kim’s practice spans poetry, translation, essays, and scholarship in visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. For this program Kim reflects on the exhibition Fear of Property and then joins curator Karsten Lund in conversation around questions of property, poetry, and art.
Kim’s first book of poetry, Gospel of Regicide, was published in 2017 by Noemi Press. John Keene writes, “These poems, mutable in form and style yet cohesive in their vision, suggest a complex and different order allowing us to ‘complete the story.’ Kim kills the king, and blesses us with a superlative collection as a result.†Or as Lillian-Yvonne Bertram puts it, “Gospel of Regicide is satisfyingly unapologetic in its propositions for alternate futures, histories, and homes.â€
Her forthcoming monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation (Duke University Press) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of U.S. museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property became foundational to modern artistic institutions.
Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.
About the Exhibition
Isshaq Albarbary, Joi T. Arcand, Kevin Beasley, Marissa Lee Benedict, Cassandra Press, Daniel de Paula, Niloufar Emamifar, Matias Faldbakken, Karrabing Film Collective, Ghislaine Leung, Christopher Meerdo, Yukultji Napangati, Pedro Neves Marques, David Rueter, Rose Salane, Christopher Williams, Andrew Norman Wilson
Property: something protected or shared or forcefully taken, something gained or lost or desired or savored. Private property plays a role in well-being, some philosophers have argued, but it’s also been the basis for centuries of exploitation, as history has shown. Either way, so much has come to rest on this concept. It’s an abstract idea that shapes concrete reality in profound ways, shadowed by questions of who owns what, and why, and the friction of public and private interests. As time goes by, property also comes in many different forms: some are physical, others increasingly intangible, some deeply familiar and others leading toward unknown horizons.
Fear of Property develops out of ongoing conversations with artists around these ideas, various related histories and emerging futures, and a range of lived experiences in between. The exhibition also gradually builds on the intuition that property organizes not only social and economic relations, but dimensions of emotional lÂife today as well. The works on view have their own unique contours of feeling as such, even as they draw out concerns around ownership and agency, land or technology, caretaking and loss, cultural erasure and acts of reclamation, financial speculation, and more. And some of them might hint at ways of being in the world that aren’t framed in terms of “property†at all.
Curated by Karsten Lund.
Image: Pedro Neves Marques, The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant, 2016 (video still), Courtesy of the artist.
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Tags: Andrew Norman Wilson, Cassandra Press, Chicago, Christopher Meerdo, Christopher Williams, Daniel de Paula, David Rueter, Discussion with Eunsong Kim, Fear of Property, Ghislaine Leung, Hyde Park, Isshaq Albarbary, Joi T. Arcand, Karrabing Film Collective, Karsten Lund, Kevin Beasley, Marissa Lee Benedict, Matias Faldbakken, Niloufar Emamifar, Pedro Neves Marques, Renaissance Society, Rose Salane, Yukultji Napangati
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