Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Arts & Disability Network Manitoba and in the context of their festival Art + Body, will be hosting a performance by Christine Sun Kim on Thursday, October 10 at 7:00 pm. There will be a reception to follow.

New York based artist Christine Sun Kim will be arriving in Winnipeg this October, fresh from her August performance at MoMA. As a deaf, mute, internationally recognized sound artist, Kim is an outstanding, compelling example of how having a disability isn’t something to overcome, but something that can enhance and inspire art through a unique perspective. She describes her practice as “unlearning sound etiquette.” Her primary creative goal: “my art as my voice.”

Christine Sun Kim’s performances/installations create a visual physical feedback, allowing her to feel sound and communicate her sound and vision through art. She is reclaiming sound as property generally considered to belong only to those who can hear. “There are social norms surrounding sound that form our speech development and our way of handling sound with care. They’re so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without sound,” explains Kim, whose favourite sounds include, “my own muffled scream, feedback, planes taking off, and anything rhythmic at 180 bpm.”

She describes her experience of sound as “two things: ghost and currency. It’s there, but I don’t see it … And I am aware how much value society puts in sound, music, and vocal languages. It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large.”

Christine Sun Kim’s work and ideas will provide a striking, powerful focal point for the whole Art + Body festival and inspire artists and audiences alike.  See Me Hear advances ADNM’s mandate: supporting artists with disabilities in achieving artistic excellence, increasing the visibility of these artists within all disciplines, and promoting policies/practices that make the arts more accessible to all.

For a more detailed itinerary of Art + Body Festival, please visit Arts & Disability Network Manitoba.

Deaf from birth, artist Christine Sun-Kim has established her own voice through experimentation with sound art. Her early works focused on translation from the sonic to the visual, but before long she began to explore the politics of sound itself, reflecting on her own experience of reading and learning sound etiquette by mirroring other people’s actions and reactions. Performance is the newest form with which she raises questions on the ownership of sound as well as sound and oral languages as social currency.