Kimsooja

BALTIC presents Korean artist Kimsooja’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibition includes the major works A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman-Yamuna River, India. Kimsooja's work combines performance, video, and installation, addressing issues of the displaced self. Kimsooja brings together a conceptual, logical, and structural investigation of performance through immobility that inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.

A Needle Woman, composed of eight simultaneous videos, documents the artist as she stands motionless in the crowded streets of Lagos, Nigeria, Mexico City, Cairo, New York, Delhi, Tokyo, Shanghai, and London putting the viewer at the centre of a global space. The world weaves past the artist’s needle-like figure, acting as an instrument, a medium that establishes connections, relationships and experience, expands time and seeks universal truths.

A Laundry Woman-Yamuna River, India, considers nature, stillness and movement and the cycle of life and death as the river slides by, picking up flotsam and washing away the earth. The works in the exhibition question our notion of the self and contemplate a universality that hints at a possible truth of existence.

Kim Sooja
Kurator: Katherine Welsh