Urban Gleaner.
Urban Gleaner explores the notion of collective identity with regard to the often elastic political term ‘Community’.
Through this Masters project Kim investigated the forgotten and overlooked, taking a photographic and dialogical journey across geographically defined boundries. She gathered abandoned fragments left to expire. Fragments that collectively revealed a communal image and exposed the lives being lived out behind urban walls.
A series of installations inserted the fragments back into spaces they were gathered from, creating a reconcontextualised reading of identity.
The work examined the complex and complicit relationship between contemporary art and human detritus.
“In thousands of eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected”, Walter Benjamin.
Kim references, Robert Putman’s book, ‘Bowling Alone’, with each project exploring the notion of social capital and the danger of assumed identity.
The art historian Miwon Kwon, argues that politically coherent communities are more, rather than less, vulnerable to appropriation because they use collective identities. Kim’s work as an artist interrogates how we are defined as a collective, in order to understand the space that divides us as individuals.