● Curator: Amy Mihyang Ginther
● Artists: kimura byol-nathalie lemoine, kate-hers RHEE, and Leah Nichols
● Period: Oct 26, 2020 – Nov 22, 2020
● Location: https://www.ahlfoundation.org/wearemany (AHL Viewing Room)
AHL Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting Korean artists, is proud to present its new online exhibition, [dis]locations: Traversing solidarities within Korean adopted activisms, opening October 26th, at 8:00 PM EST. Curated by Amy Mihyang Ginther, an adopted Korean activist, theatre maker, and Assistant Professor at the University of California: Santa Cruz, [dis]locations: Traversing solidarities within Korean adopted activisms explores the complexities of transnational adopted Korean artist-activists and how their intersectional identities, experiences of loss and connection, and solidarities with other historically marginalized and displaced communities unfold and evolve in non-linear ways in their work.
The exhibition features three adopted Korean artist-activists: kimura byol-nathalie lemoine, a Belgian-Canadian multimedia artist based in Montreal producing conceptual work, digital prints and videos that largely deal with issues surrounding multi identities such as diaspora, displacement, and gender; Leah Nichols, an award-winning filmmaker, animator, and designer based in San Francisco, who seeks to encourage efforts at the intersections of art, community organizing, and policy change through her work; and kate-hers RHEE, an interdisciplinary artist, transnationally working in Germany, South Korea and the United States, whose artistic practice engages with post-colonial discourses surrounding collecting practices, artifact exhibition, and cross cultural encounters.
[dis]locations: Traversing solidarities within Korean adopted activisms, seeks to explore Dr. Eleana J. Kim’s assertion that adopted Korean identity “is continually performed, negotiated, and contested.” The action of traversing is capacious enough to evoke multiple experiences of this negotiation: over and through, back and forth, sideways, in opposition to, through examination, or through denial. These contradictory movements amplify these artists’ explorations of their activisms and personhoods, honoring their shifts through time, locations, bodies, and mediums to destabilize normative chronologies and essentialist identities confined through nation and family. These works compel the audience to sit with the absence of a simple process, to [dis]locate themselves from their comfort, and to invite the possibilities of these collective/individual struggles within.
[dis]locations: Traversing solidarities within Korean adopted activisms runs through November 22nd and can be accessed through the Viewing Room on the AHL Foundation’s website (www.ahlfoundation.org/). This exhibition was made possible thanks to support from the Overseas Koreans Foundation.
