Galleria Raffaella Cortese is thrilled to present Kimsooja’s fourth exhibition at the gallery since her first collaboration in 2004. It will run concurrently to her site specific installation To Breathe for the Cappella Portinari at the Basilica di Sant’Eustorgio in Milan (March 10th – June 15th).
Kimsooja is an internationally acclaimed conceptual multi-disciplinary South Korean artist who has always identified nomadism as an unavoidable condition of contemporary being, drawing on her continuous movements as an indispensable source of material for the creation of her works. Combining performance, video, photography, and installation, her research is focused on themes that investigate the dualistic and existential nature of philosophy such as the relationship between yin and yang, life and death, mobility and immobilty, location and dislocation, developing her work around various fundamental issues of life, art and politics.
On the occasion of this exhibition Kimsooja presents two works that are strongly connected to each other: a video and an installation. The space at via Stradella 4 features the video To Breathe – The Flags, a transnational state of identity that merges two hundred forty-six national flags as indistinguishable cross-pollinating visual symbols, their purported intent-as symbols of state sovereignty and nationhood-emptied and reconfigured by layering and cross-fading. Since the images are semi-transparent, the colors and designs of multiple flags are intermixed. What results is a visual and symbolic breakdown of hierarchies, and transcendence of boundaries blurring the distinctions between different countries. The work also includes flags from nations that are not internationally recognized, such as Scotland or Tibet, as well as nations whose flags are forbidden in other countries, such as North Korea. In merging the flags without restriction, To Breathe – The Flags provides a representation of the new nations or non-nations within its compressed layers, briefly dissolving their discrepancies and blurring their national identities. In the first iteration of this work, which was commissioned by the IOC Olympic Museum for the London 2012 Summer Olympics, the artist layered flags of all the participating countries in a reflection of the unifying spirit of the games.
Installation views
