• "My work explores the awakening of the self and the other... It is an awakening of the hidden meanings in elements of our mundane lives, to which the viewers previously haven't paid much attention."

• Growing up in South Korea, Kimsooja describes her complex spiritual background informed by Buddhism, Catholicism, and a code of moral conduct influenced by Confucianism. After high school, she intentionally "stepped out of organized religion in order to experience the real world". The artist felt uncomfortable with the systematization of beliefs and behavior within the faith traditions. Although Kimsooja does not practice Buddhism formally, her beliefs and personal practices strongly parallel this philosophy of life.

• A Laundry Woman (2002) is a video projection that suggests the harmony of the universe through its stillness and tranquility (figs. 25 and 26). It documents a meditative performance by the artist along the Yamuna River in North India. Videotaped from a slightly elevated vantage point and seen from the back, Kimsooja's figure is silhouetted against blue, opalescent waters. Although the sky is not visible, the viewer is made conscious of its presence by the reflections of flying birds in the water. The artist remains perfectly still while the video captures her state of quiet mindfulness.

• Kimsooja describes her experience during this meditation: "In the middle of the performance, I was completely confused...[about] whether it is the river which is running and moving or myself." The artist's perceptions of space and time were turned upside down and mentally she became completely immersed in and at one with the water. She later realized that it is not the river that constantly changes but her body, which is transforming all the time: "My body will disappear while the river is still flowing."

• While watching the video, the viewer slowly becomes aware of the ritual offerings and ashes of deceased people who were cremated at a site along the river. The cycle of life and death becomes a powerful theme in the work. Kimsooja began thinking of the decomposed bodies that floated before her. She meditated on "their lives and their memories and was trying to purify their bodies as well as mine. Praying for their future life with compassion for human beings." The artist experienced a heightened sense of what she describes as "awakeness", particularly in her awareness of the relationship between nature and the body, stillness and movement, life and death.

• By interpreting the confluence of river and atmosphere, Kimsooja highlights an idea embraced by many artists in the exhibition: the unity of life. She describes the effect of blending water and sky as a mirror presenting both reality and its opposite dimension. From a formal perspective, the artist conceives the river as a surface that is similar to a two-dimensional canvas. There is a strong impulse towards abstraction in A Laundry Woman, which reflects Kimsooja's early career as a painter.

• Through the video, the artist invites the viewer to share her meditative experience. As she explains, "That is why my body is facing against the viewer. Look at what I look at. I do not present my ego, my identity." Kimsooja's desire for the viewer to "wear" her body suggests the idea of the artist as mediator in order to open possibilities for other people to participate in a "certain awareness and awakening." She points out that there are few opportunities in daily life to achieve this concentrated state of mind.

• In A Laundry Woman, Kimsooja's body in essence becomes an offering for others to use in order to achieve an expanded consciousness. "Some people referred to me as a shaman who mediates between the dead and the living. I sometimes feel that way too because, in a way, I am doing that all the time. I think it comes from compassion. Understanding others' suffering. Sharing suffering. Sharing love." For many people familiar with India, the title of the work may conjure images of the low-caste women whose livelihood revolves around the river. In this interpretation, the artist becomes the laundry woman in an act of empathy.

• While discussing the idea of pairing A Laundry Woman with a small sculpture of Buddha Shakyamuni touching the earth to witness his enlightenment, Kimsooja immediately responded to the shared symbolic gesture in the two works of art (fig. 4). She noted that her video establishes connections between the individual and nature; similarly, the Buddha links himself to the land. Through the body, she also connects herself with other human beings from all cultures. As she explains, "All human activities are about linking the self to the other."

• Relationships are a central theme in a group of installations that depict sewing as a metaphor for threading together different aspects of life. Kimsooja conceives her video works as "invisible sewing." The artist created another work with the title of Laundry Woman (exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Vienna and the Zacheta Gallery of Art in Warsaw, 2002), an installation consisting of suspended fabrics that suggest linens drying outdoors. These materials become symbols of women, love, the body, and sleep. On a social level, they are associated with women's roles in society. For Kim, cloth transcends its materiality and functions as "a container for the spirit"; people are swathed at birth and at death in cloth, and it is also used ceremonially in weddings and other rites of passage.

• The Laundry Woman also relates to a group of works called Bottari — beautifully wrapped bundles of used Korean bedcovers, fabrics that are either manufactured or sewn by mothers and daughters as shared experiences. These pieces of cloth remind us of the cycle of life; they are used to bundle together household possessions when leaving home, and they help to establish domestic comfort in the absence of a true shelter. Their stitches bind people together.

• Kimsooja insists that what is most essential is not the body of work but the questions that it raises. She hopes that the viewer will participate in her works by sharing this inquiring state of mind. When asked what her hopes were for the museum visitor, she replied, "I would like the audience to share with me the experience I had during my performance, question and answer, and really put each one's state of mind and body into that position."

• Visitors arriving at this gallery, recently relocated to midtown from Harlem, will step into a darkened room carpeted and painted meditative, deep-space blue. Sitting down risks becoming entranced by the little bubbles moving around one of the four circular red-yellow-and-blue jukebox speakers placed on each wall, where they emit a warm, tap-room glow.

• Some viewers may be as struck by the speakers' resemblance to Tibetan mandalas (symbolizing the design of the universe) as was Kimsooja, who arrived in New York from South Korea in 1998 and saw in these artifacts of American pop culture a perfect meld of East and West. Others maybe reminded of stained-glass windows, since what pours out is an ethereal mix of Gregorian, Islamic and Tibetan chants that circulate, like those bubbles, in an endless loop of male voices, both rumbling and sweet.

• In her previous installations and videos, Kimsooja focused on the body as a protective cover for powerful emotions. Korean textiles figured prominently, wrapping immigrants or outcasts as they moved from place to place with belongings that survived them and were passed to others. It is the unmoving viewer being wrapped this time, in waves of sound and light. But because there is more here to experience internally than to see, viewers may dismiss the work as a literalized notion of the-gallery-as-chapel in which to worship at the altar of art, without realizing that they are part of the ritual.

• 베니스, 상파울로, 리용 등 세계 유수의 비엔날레에 초대되면서 세계를 무대로 활발한 활동을 하고 있는 김수자는 전통적인 천과 바느질이라는 일상적인 행위를 삶과 사회를 포용하는 예술로 승화시킨 작가이다. 그는 1980년대 초반 어머니와 함께 이불을 꿰매다가 천이라는 소재를 새롭게 자각 하게 되었고, 천이라는 소재에 필연적으로 수반되는 바느질의 행위에서 당시 자신은 물론 미술계가 천착하였던 '평면' 의 한계를 극복할 가능성을 발견하게 된다. 그러나 주로 천 위에 드로잉 또는 채색을 가미한 그의 1980년대 후반까지의 작품들은 비록 캔버스를 벗어나긴 하였으나 평회화의 또 다른 연장이었다고 볼 수 있다. 그러다 1990년에 들어서면서 창호지 문틀이나 지게, 얼레 등 전통적인 일상의 오브제들을 천으로 감싸 그 기본 구조를 재확인하는 <연역적 오브제> 시리즈 작업을 하면서 그는 천을 평면적으로 다루던 기존의 작업에서 탈피하여 천이 가진 입체성에 주목하기 시작한다.

• 김수자를 세계적으로 유명하게 한 보따리와의 만남은 뉴욕 P.S. 1에서 작업을 하던 중 우연히 이루어졌다. 천 작업을 하려고 싸놓았던 보따리를 어느 순간 이제까지와는 전혀 다른 새로운 시각으로 보게 된 것이다. 작가의 말에 따르면 보따리는 평면적인 천을'묶는다'는 단순한 행위를 통해 서 3차원화 할 수 있으며 따라서 회화적 방법을 연출할 수 있는 동시에 볼륨있는 조각으로 볼 수도 있다는 것이다. 보따리는 평면이 3차원화한 입체내지는 오브제이면서 그것이 놓이는 장소성이라 는 문제와 연관될 때 설치로서 자리하기도 한다. 처음에 평면에 대한 대체물로 천을 채택하였던 김수자는 천의 여러 가지 다양성을 모색하면서 그것의 끊임없은 확산 가능성을 깨닫게 되었고, 특히 공간에 유연하게 대처할 수 있는 보따리를 발견하면서 계속적으로 공간, 장소에 대한 관심을 확대해 나아갔다.

• 1997년 11일간 트럭에 보따리를 가득 싣고 전국을 일주하는 퍼포먼스를 담아 제작한 비디오 작품 〈떠도는 도시들-2727km 보따리 트럭〉은 평면, 오브제, 설치 작업의 과정을 두루 거치면서 그의 작업 영역이 전시장 밖으로 더욱 확장되어 나아갔음을 보여 준다.이 작품은 군인이었던 아버지를 따라 이사를 자주 하였던 어린 시절에 대한 기억의 흐름을 따라가는 여정이자 작업을 위해 세 계 곳곳을 돌아다니는 현재 자신의 모습을 은유하면서 보따리 자체에 내재되어 있는 '이동'과 '유 랑' 의 정서를 표출한 작품이다. 이 보따리 트럭이 1998년 상 파울로 비엔날레와 1999년의 베니 스 비엔날레에 출품되면서 김수자는 세계미술계에 유랑과 자유로운 의식의 유목주의적 사유와 함 께 정체성에 대한 문제 등을 제기한 일명 '보따리' 작가로 알려지게 된다.
  김수자 작업의 기본이었던 바느질이라는 행위도 실제로 꿰매는 행위 없이 실과 바늘이 없이도 관계를 맺어 가는 개념적인 바느질 작업으로 전개되어 나아갔다. 작가는 특히 바늘이 갖는 '치유의 도구'로서의 기능에 주목하면서 스스로를 바늘에 비유하기 시작한다. 그에게 바느질 행위는 '호흡 또는 소통같은 것'이며 분리된 것들을 한땀 한땀 이어 나가 관계를 맺게 하는 행위이다. 바늘은 매개체로서 갈라진 틈 사이를 지나면서 그 틈을 연결시키지만 정작 남는 것은 자신과 연결되었던 실만이 흔적으로 남을 뿐이다. 작가는 이렇게 매개체로서의 역할이 끝난 후 무(無)화되는 바늘과 자기 자신을 동일시 하는 것이다.

• 바늘로서의 작가의 모습은 일본 동경의 시부야 거리와 중국 상하이, 인도 델리, 그리고 미국 뉴욕에서 벌인 퍼포먼스를 담은 비디오 작품 <바늘 여인>에서 분명하게 나타난다. 길 한가운데에서 마주 오는 행인들을 바라 보며 미동도 없이 서 있는 작가의 모습과 각 도시 행인들의 다양한 반응을 담은 이 비디오 작업은 자신의 몸을 매개로 하여 나와 타인, 나와 세계의 관계를 엮고자 하는 작가 의 시각을 반영하고 있다. 그는 이 작업에 대해 "하나의 매개체, 혹은 바로미터 또는 나침반으로서 의 작가의 몸은 인파 속에서 스쳐 가는 사람들을 보이지 않게 관계 지을 뿐 결국 투명 인간처럼 거의 무의 상태로 소외되고 사라지고 만다"고 설명한다. 우리의 일상 생활과 떨어질 수 없는 천이라는 소재와 전통적으로 여성의 노동이었던 바느질이라는 일상적 행위를 인간의 보편적인 문맥으로 발전시켜 나간 김수자는 결국 자신의 예술을 사유하는 것으로 정의하고 그 속에 치유, 정화, 그리고 포용을 내포하는 관계 맺기를 지향하고 있다.

• Kimsooja transforms the quotidian act of sewing and traditional cloths into art that embraces life and society. She has exhibited her art all over the world, including many prominent international art biennales such as Venice, Sao Paolo, and Lyon. It was sometime in the early 1980s, Kim recalls, that she came to realize cloth as a new artistic medium, while sewing a blanket cover with her mother. In the act of sewing, which necessarily accompanies the material of cloth, Kim also discovered a possibility of overcoming the limitations of the "surface plane" — the concept to which the modernist-dominated art world still was fettered. Through the late 1980s, she produced a series of works — drawings and paintings done on unstretched cloths — to break away from the painting canvas, but these works were still an extension of 2-dimensional painting. In the early 1990s, Kim began to produce the series titled Deductive Objects; she took traditional everyday objects such as a doorframe, an A-frame, and a bobbin, and swathed them with cloths, in the process reassuring the objects’ basic structures. With this series of works, Kim reached a turning point in her art, in which cloth is no longer treated as a 2-dimensional pictorial surface, but a material open to many 3-dimensional potentials.

• Kim’s encounter with the bottari (a bundle of household belongings wrapped in traditional Korean bedcovers), for which she would be widely known, took place rather fortuitously when she was in artist’s residency at P.S.1, New York. One day, Kim began to see wrapped bundles"bottaris"she had collected in a corner of her studio with a new eye. Kim states that the bottari turns flat cloths into a three-dimensional object through the simple act of "wrapping" — a method of making that is both painterly and sculptural; the bottari is a flat surface turned into a volumetric object, and can also further evoleve into an installation when located in specific place. Although she was initially interested in cloth as an alternative to the modernist flat surface, Kimsooja soon came to understand the material’s infinite possibilities through her exploration of its multi-faceted character. It was through her discovery of the bottari, the form that can flexibly adapt to different environments, that her work began to develop spatially.

• In her 1997 video work Cities on the Move - 2727 km bottari truck, she traveled throughout the countryside of Korea for 11 days in a small truck piled high with bottaris in the back. This work is an eloquent testimony to how her work went through the processes of painting, object, and installation, gradually exploding out of the gallery walls. Kim moved often when she was a child because her father, who was a serviceman, had frequent job transfers. In that sense, Cities on the move is a travel through the memories of her own childhood. At the same time, it is a metaphor for her current state of being, an artist who constantly travels for work to different places in the world, and the work expresses the sensibilities of "on the move" and "itinerant" inherent in the bottari. When the video protion of the work, accompanied by the bottari truck, were shown at the 1998 Bienal do Sao Paolo and the 1999 La Biennale di Venezia, Kimsooja became known in the art world as the so-called bottari artist who poses the questions of identity, mobility, borderlessness, and nomadism.

• The main methodology of her artmaking"sewing"also went through subsequent evolutionary processes. In more recent years, sewing for Kim has become a conceptual act, without an actual needle or thread, of forming and mediating relations. Pointing to the function of "healing" which the needle possesses, the artist compares her own being to the needle. For Kim, sewing is "like breathing, or communicating" and is an act of bringing separate beings together by linking them, one stitch at a time. The needle is a mediator that travels in the gap, closing it. But when the needle completes its work, the trace of its labor remains only as the thread which it was attached to. The artist identifies with the needle, then in the sense that when her role as mediator is finished, her being becomes "Nothing".

• The artist as the needle appears again and again in A Needle Woman (1999-2000), a series of video works which records Kim’s repeated performances on the streets of Shibuya (Tokyo), Shanghai, Delhi, and New York. In all these videos, Kimsooja stands motionless, with her back facing the camera and her front facing the oncoming traffic of pedestrians. The bypassing people’s responses captured by the camera’s eye are varied depending on the location of the performance. The work is a manifestation of the artist’s wish to sew the self and the others, and the self and the world into relationships, using her own body as the medium. Kim explains A Needle Woman as follows: "the artist’s body, as a medium, or a barometer or a compass, forms only unseen links between people passing by it, but in the end, it becomes alienated and almost disappears into the state of nothingness, like an invisible man." Earlier, Kimsooja’s art developed cloths (an irreplaceable part of our lives) and sewing (traditionally women’s labor) into the general human context through her art. Now, she sees her art as a metaphor, and in it, she wishes to make relationships of healing, cleansing, and ultimately, embrace.

• "The body itself is the most complicated bundle." — Kim Sooja

I. Sewing beyond space and time

• Since the 1980s, between thread and needle, Kim Sooja's work has been developing; from Korea to New York, via Paris and a number of other cities across the different continents, like an avowed metaphor of the act of sewing. But it is less a question of sewing as such than linking up and uniting fragments of varied realities that were previously disparate. From her first works, with pieces laid end to end and sewn together, like a sort of collage involving both hand, body and mind in relation to matter, up to the recent videos of A Needle Woman, where the artist herself becomes a needle and integrates into the urban fabric, sewing has been the guiding thread in a subtle research project from which a language has evolved, and where a unique commitment can be read, with references that are first of all local, but whose scope has become global.

• Over the course of time, Kim Sooja went from matter and the plane of the painting to the conquest of a liberating third dimension, and this allowed her to acquire greater mobility with the works entitled Bottari. In her videos and performances, her language subsequently became ever more economical, pursuing as though by incursion the possibility of the emergence of her oeuvre. The artist would like to be a needle that leaves no mark, that sews and disappears after closing the wound; after joining two bits of cloth, two continents or states of consciousness. Her discretion is consubstantial with her research, and her self-effacement facilitates revelation: to the appearance of the other, and to his presence. This path starts out from an approach to textiles, and a practice, that are rooted in Korean tradition but go beyond these local references through a language which is that of wandering, exchange and openness to the other, the unknown.

• Kim Sooja's training as a painter predisposed her to consider the plane surface of the canvas as a field of exploration. Her first compositions were formal, based on grids and interlinking motifs. She had a penchant for the art of the 20th-century avant-gardes, and notably Mondrian, both in her practice and in the theoretical spirit that informed all her work. But the physical dimension of her sewn canvases dominated her work. The very act of making a picture with pieces of fabric became predominant, and this opened the way to gestures that were simpler, though just as emblematic.

• Sewing thus became the essential element of her artistic process in the 1980s, to the point where it overshadowed pictorial considerations as such, and introduced the emotional charge that she had discovered while sewing by her mother's side. The act of sewing is one of intimacy, of withdrawing into oneself, close to symbiosis with a state of being that represents both tradition and family memory. This activity — almost passive, enthralling — locks the artist into a sequence of slow movements that repeat to infinity and are conducive to meditation. It is to be one with oneself, the fact of saturating oneself in one's own history. And the blankets made by Kim Sooja and her mother brought together two worlds that had previously been dissociated: the ancestral Korean tradition and her own pictorial quest.

• Kim Sooja's first works were an introspection turned towards herself, and a way of calling herself into question so as to become a totality. In this sense, the action she accomplished could be seen as the denouement of the self. Skein, bobbin or hank: the thread has to be unwound.

• The process begins with choosing pieces of cloth. To collect different textiles is to recompose one's being as one would reconstruct the fragments of a past: bits of individual stories that are becoming a new wholeness. The assemblage of these lacerations retains the marks and stigmata of the bodies that have borne them, with their dreams and daily sufferings. These recomposed entities become offerings, surrogates through which the memory of the other can act.

• To salvage materials, assemble them, and sew them together is an intoxicating, almost ecstatic act of patience and repetition (from immobility to rapture). By the monotony of the gesture, this process makes it possible, also, to create a void within oneself — a void which can become a plenitude. For Kim Sooja, a work like Portrait of Yourself (1990-1991) is a solitary confession, an incessant and infinite conversation with oneself. The process is as important as the result. The production of this particular work is something like a meditation, and if one approaches it with the required intimacy it becomes a mandala. Iso it is both a self-portrait and a profound expression, a communication of the artist's humours, which shows how she carried out an apprenticeship on herself, how she matured through experiencing the passage of time and stepping aside from its onward movement. Despite the repetition of a movement that could become tiresome, the artist claims to have derived a great deal of energy from the experience. Through it she renewed her resources, as is suggested by the title of a work dating from this period, Towards the Mother Earth (1990-1991).

• The back-and-forth movement of the needle through the material, from front to back, again and again, ended up by going beyond the plane surface, surreptitiously opening up towards a third dimension. Applying a reductionist logic to her work, Kim Sooja began covering objects with fabric, and thereby conquering space.

• At the beginning of the 1990s came the first constructions of this order (Untitled, 1991). Two hoops connected by rods made the shift from the line to the third dimension. These constructions were then enveloped in pieces of fabric as a way of freeing them from the wall (which indicated a transition in the oeuvre), and from the plane surface of the painting, without giving up the symbolic charge of the first sewn works. For a time, the artist moved away from the act of sewing, strictly speaking, and transposed her metaphor into the simple act of covering objects.

II. Enveloping memory

• Always seeking greater simplicity, Kim Sooja has rendered this emancipating act more radical still over the last decade, with works which now constitute, in a way, her signature: the bundles entitled Bottari.

• The first of these date from 1992. They were created in the Open Studio at the P.S.1 (a contemporary art centre in New York, now associated with MOMA), and came into being, according to the artist, spontaneously, unrelated to any particular consciousness of things. But though nothing anticipated the event, everything announced the simplification of the procedure that had already been set up, in the direction of its essence and its highest degree of efficacy, with the abolition of all artifice, accessory or substrate in favour of the fabric alone. Cloth became the content and the container of the work, its structure and its surface, inside and outside. The Bottari provided an aesthetic solution to the question of the surface by stepping outside it, with a structure which was both open and closed; which revealed and concealed at the same time.

• The bundle corresponds as much to a reference within the Korean tradition as to a universal metaphor of displacement, or even adventure, and a Bottari can hold all an individual's belongings. Originally, the custom was to use still-serviceable scraps of bright-coloured, precious silk from worn-out clothing, something of which was thus preserved.

• In Korea, fabrics are traditionally used for multiple common functions such as storing bedding and clothing, or moving it around, notably when it has to be washed, as well as transporting food, or even wrapping gifts. For Koreans, the Bottari is both intimate and familiar, and is used on a daily basis. It is a sign of time-honoured aesthetic refinement, and is often an object of great value. It carries a strong affective charge, and is passed down from generation to generation.

• It is symptomatic that Kim Sooja first explored the Bottari's possibilities while living outside Korea. She marked her return from her memorable stay at the P.S.1, where she had been a guest artist, with a Bottari installation in an abandoned house in Kyunju (1994). Bottari symbolize, in a way, the migrant who can put all his material goods in a bundle and be ready to set off at any moment. So when she came back and placed her bundles on a floor, Kim Sooja was reclaiming the space, but she was also indicating her readiness for an imminent departure. The inclination to travel is constant, or even necessary, when one has been elsewhere.

• The "elsewhere" through which the artist found herself confronted with another perception of woman remains implicit as an underlying theme in her work: the body is torn between the modern Western world and her Eastern ancestral universe. This ambivalence would be irreconcilable if travelling did not offer a possibility of agreement between two different universes, in their alternation.

• The resulting tension, which is latent in all her work, was laid bare by an installation, Deductive Object / Dedicated to my Neighbors, presented at Nagoya in 1996, where two forms amongst her productions were brought together in the exhibition space. For the first time, Kim Sooja made a contrast between the placing of the bundles and an arrangement of Korean bedspreads on the floor.

• These are often given as presents to accompany a bride's trousseau, and are one of a household's most treasured possessions. In their folds they silently attest to the history of the couple. The motifs are symbolic references and exhortations to a happy life full of love, children and health.

• Between the revelation of the bedspreads' symbolic motifs and the mystery of the bundles, with the precious contents that can be imagined, there is a tension which is all the stronger when one realizses the particular importance of the traditional bedspread in the Korean context; and it goes beyond a purely formal interpretation of the opposition between the flat surface of the bedspreads and the sculptural dimension of the bundles. The installation thus makes it possible to appreciate, simultaneously, the unveiling of a private life and the intensity of a retreat into oneself.

• The bedspread is a witness-object whose day-to-day contact everyone can feel, It accompanies love, sex, dreams, nightmares, childbirth... and finally, at the moment of death, it becomes a shroud. So this envelope is a sort of skin, carrying in its folds what could be considered as a sort of portrait of its owner(s). Folded onto itself as a Bottari, the bedspread gathers up intimate possessions and protects them from inquisitive eyes. Opened out, it gives itself up in its flatness, and suggests the dreams that are incorporated into its traditional motifs.

• In this sense, the Nagoya installation, so simple and pure in its expression, contained an entire mode of thinking about time, and the cycle of life and death. Later, exploiting the charged nature of such references, the artist used the bedspreads by themselves in various situations, as restaurant tablecloths and lines stretched out for washing to be hung on. With each installation, the visitor's participation is decisive, since it is up to him to activate the mechanism. In the case of a tablecloth, it is the actual use of the table by the visitor, in a museum restaurant, that makes the work exist. In the Korean context, this almost-reverse use of the bedspread as a tablecloth is of the order of thea transgression, since tradition prohibits eating in the place where one sleeps. For the duration of a meal, the tablecloth is an integral part of the table companions' life. It is imprinted with the stains they leave, the traces of this slice of existence that it will have subtly transformed by its presence.

• As in most of Kim Sooja's other installations, the onlooker is thus a protagonist — a constitutive element of the space in question. When he moves around to look at the work from different viewpoints, it is renewed at each step. Pursuing this logic so as to extend it ever further, in a recent presentation of the Laundry installations at the Peter Blum gallery in New York, A Mirror Woman (2002) had mirrors on all the walls with lines stretched out for hanging up washing. The spectator's contemplation of the work was eroded by his discovery of himself in the mirrors, which projected the field of the work into an infinite space. This visual confrontation with oneself is a curious, singular fact in a work that is characterizsed rather by the inconspicuousness of the artist in the interest of internalizsed reflection. In general, when a figure appears in her work (and in her more recent videos it is often herself), it has its back turned, as if to suggest a presence, but not a particular individuality. This is the case, for example, in the video of her performance Cities on the Move - 2727 Kilometers.

• In November 1997, rejoining the nomadic life of contemporary artists, the better to in order to better reinforce it (but also enlarging the field of action of her work and its semantic purview), Kim Sooja decided to take her bundles on the road. She spent eleven days going round towns and other places in Korea that held specific memories for her. This meant that her bundles were loaded with new content: the memory of her past history and travels. In the filmed performance she is seen from behind, hieratic and impassive, sitting above firmly-attached Bottari in a truck driving through ever-changing scenery.

• The idea of moving around becomes a reality in this video, which combines, for the first time in such an obvious way, a sense of the intimate and with a public dimension. The artist's silhouette, in its sobriety and black clothes, unlike the Bottari with their vivid, varied colours, stands up straight, like a needle.

• The fact that she presents us only her back is a procedure that challenges us and thrusts us into the middle of the landscape. As in Caspar David Friedrich's romantic paintings, the silhouette of a back becomes our bodily referent, and we project onto it. This transfer gives extra substance to the work, and confers on it a shape for us, so that we become the subject. (The phenomenon is clearer still in the later videos of towns, which this performance adumbrates). Perched high up on the bundles, while the road goes by, the needle-woman both cuts through the landscape and sews it up again, the way a wound closes up. Finally, this Calvary of memory is a way for Kim Sooja to forge a link with her history and re-inject an emotional charge into her itinerary. So the Bottari that she takes round with her are phantoms of time gone by, to which this itinerary pays tribute. Each of them can be related to a person, and the journey takes on the character of a pilgrimage in honour of dear, loved beings.

• This dimension of personal ritual was transcended when the artist presented her Bottari Truck in major festivals of contemporary art. What was of the order of the intimate then took on a universal, even denunciatory dimension with regard to its context.

• She has taken part in the biennials which are the focal points of artistic nomadism: São Paulo (the 24th, in 1998), Venice (the 48th, in 1999), and Lyon (the 5th, in 2000). Arriving as in a bazaar upon which groups from different regions converge to exchange merchandise and cultures, the truck filled with Bottari of every colour accentuates the idea of displacement at the very moment when the international press is taking an interest in the situation of populations forced into exile across the world. But if Kim Sooja's installation can express displacement as a positive value, a search for a new paradise, it cannot cancel out the premises that any change of place is firstly seen as the breakup of a unity that has been lost forever. Displacement always implies cutting oneself off from one's birthplace and ancestral roots. There are voluntary exiles who have struck it lucky and found a better life. But deep in the soul of the uprooted person there is always a secret, persistent wound.

• The historical context of the Bottari Truck cannot fail to recall the atrocities committed at the time of its creation in the Balkans, Africa and the Near East (to mention only those that made the headlines).

• It is often never-ending struggles, and more rarely natural disasters, that force entire populations to pack up their bundles and set out from home, into the unknown. The Bottari, with their shimmering colours, convey all these paradoxical feelings, which are stirring memories but also as well as deep wounds.

III. The simultaneous elsewhere

• Following the thread of her wanderings, Kim Sooja's recent series of videos are both at once subtle in their poetry, strong in their presentation, and complex in their social implications. They are grouped together by generic title. A Needle Woman alludes to her desire to disappear like a needle in a haystack, but also to be the needle that insinuates itself into the urban fabric. These performances, and the ones that derive from them, like A Beggar Woman, were presented for the first time in a solo exhibition at P.S.1 in 2001.

• A Needle Woman (1999-2001) is a set of eight videos projected simultaneously on the four walls of a room. Each shows Kim Sooja from behind, dressed identically in the most neutral possible way, immobile, facing the human wave that is rushing round her in a busy street in one of the world's most populous cities: New York, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai and Lagos.

• The artist transports us into cities in every continent by taking them into a place where we become active participants. The large-format projections bring us face to face with life-size people, justifying a total immersion in the space of the work. The artist's back — as we said above — allows us to pass through into the work, into the depths of metropolises, and to narrowly avoid the abyss. This illustrates, more or less, the Kantian definition of the sublime: to feel an emotion through the devices the artist offers us as she opens up her own experience so that we can enter into it without risk or peril. The unobtrusiveness of the artist, in spite of her presence, could produce a multitude of approaches in which individuality would give way to the essence of our own thinking.

• Kim Sooja's discretion eliminates every psychological aspect of the ordeal she has taken on. The whole point is what occurs around her, which appears as a catalyst. Taking our place in this installation, we realizse what is intimate and personal about the ordeal, for anyone who goes through it. Evidently the physical side of it begins with a meditation that leads to a sort of ecstasy. And in this sense, the artist, as an individual, is outside herself. She abstracts herself and becomes like a keyhole, or a negative image of herself, which makes perception possible for us.

• Her interest in the elsewhere makes her central to the generation of migratory artists who, at the dawn of the new millenium, are questioning the limits of globalizsation. As an artist, she is invited to present her work in cultural institutions around the globe, while the art world has gone beyond the rich countries — where there are people who take an interest in such creative activity — to include less favoured countries. The result is that artistic discourse is becomes enriched by other voices, and the circulation of works finds new perspectives.

• The simultaneity of her presence in these no more than a hunch: distant though they are from one another, and different as the historical and economic contexts may be, apart from their urbanistic and architectural characteristics, these cities are alike in the steady streams of individuals people going about their business, moving towards an inevitable meeting with their destiny. And so a continuum of races and peoples finds itself virtually at the centerre of the space. Simultaneity of presentation makes the common features of the beings in movement in these eight videos obvious at a glance. Only an attentive eye will be able to discern what differentiates them.

• While the time of the work is acting on us, our body replaces that of the artist, and becomes the needle that leads the guiding thread. A Needle Woman, as Kim Sooja likes to define herself, weaves, as much as she rends, the urban fabric. The fine needle pierces the world, but the whole universe passes through the eye of the needle. In certain contexts, in spite of her self-effacement, the artist cannot escape her otherness: she is the foreigner, the observer, the element that can split apart as well as bind together. In fact she cuts the human flow, which has to pass around her, avoid her like an obstacle, open up before her. The specificity of each particular population appears in this encounter. And the encounter is the indicator of the specificity.

• The characteristics of towns come out through contrast, according to what opposes them. Each possesses a distinct rhythm that is demonstrated by the perfect immobility of the artist as an immutable reference. Her proper time seems to be in suspension, while the rest of the town swirls round her. Kim Sooja's passivity is a source of worry and tension. One expects something to happen: an intrusion, something violent... Possible violence, like a specterre haunting life in these metropolises at every moment.

• The reactions of the passers-by (or their total absence of reaction) are archetypes of the imaginative profile that a given city suggests. And thus, without wanting to paint a sociological portrait, the videos comprise a number of elements that make it possible to characterizse the people and their surroundings: their clothes, their way of occupying the street, their attitude in urban space... For example, passers-by in New York, London and Tokyo are distinguished by their rapid, determined gait. They have an objective, and their walk is a "power walk": they are efficacious, and scarcely notice the artist's presence. They have an individual goal, outside the range of the camera, in the direction of a horizon that protects them and immunizses them against everything that could deflect them from their path. Their life is traced out, and there is no place for the unexpected. The street is only a vector, and not a place of sociability.

• In these cosmopolitan cities, all racial differences seem to fade. The artist goes almost unnoticed, and her features do not mark her out in places where there are people of all origins, and where hybrids are common. Modernity asserts itself here as an exacerbation of individuality, a sort of autism that tends towards homogeneity. Such cities are so full of stimuli and diverse fantasies that the intervention of an artist attracts little attention.

• In places like Cairo, Delhi, Mexico, and especially Lagos, on the other hand, there is a tension between the modern and the traditional which means that existence is highly charged. The individual finds his full dimensions in an open space where he is attentive to those around him, because he seeks to evaluate his position and rank in the immense gamut of social classes and traditional hierarchies that are an essential part of these cultures.

• The members of different castes and social classes mix in the street. They are wary of one another; they keep an eye on one another and expose themselves to situations in which there is always tension. Here, the street becomes a place of both coexistence and distinctions.

• In these cities where the contrasts are strong, individuals want to assert themselves across the cleavages. They look at one another so as to make comparisons between one another, and every look contains a question (Am I from the same class or not? How am I to position myself, and where, in such a wide spectrum?); so it is not surprising that these are the cities where the immobile presence of Kim Sooja gets garners the most reactions. They are still preserved from blasé mundanity, and the artist stands out more strongly as a stranger. But it is above all her passivity and her determination to abstract herself that arouse curiosity, along with a desire to make her react, to draw her out of herself, so as to bring her back to everyday life and the flux of the community. In all these cities, it is the ever-present children who are the least hesitant about teasing the artist and turning her performance into a game.

• The virtual meeting-point of eight streets in a unique space plunges us into the improbable river of the human continuum. Engulfed in the multitude, the artist is invisible, as she often aspires to being. This takes her work beyond the nature-culture cleavage, or the opposition of the contemporary urban to original nature. In natural settings, as in the performance A Needle Woman / Kitakyushu (1999), where she is stretched out on a rock, or in A Laundry Woman / Yamuna River, India (2000), where she is facing the river in question, she strives for the same contemplative detachment as in urban settings. Perhaps her deepest desire is to reconcile perfect immobility and perpetual motion. And is this not what she seems to be seeking when she indicates her wish to disappear for an entire month, as she dreamt of doing during the last Whitney Biennial? Is there not a paradox in the fact of wanting to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere?

• Kim Sooja embodies the complexity of the kind of globalizsation which both proclaims and denies the local spirit. Her work with textiles had a specificity that was linked to the Korean context of her origins. This opened up in the course of her peregrinations, gaining in breadth without cutting itself off from its roots, or disowning them. Her videos combine nature and the urban, the individual and the collective, the global and the local. The richness of her approach, in its discretion and subtlety, lies no doubt in her unique way of transcending divisions and resolving them in works that place the spectator at the heart of an extreme questioning process, which for each individual becomes personal and intimate.

• The trace of a body. Not long ago, maybe just a while ago, there was a body here. It lived in a rhythm of everyday behaviour and actions, shaping the values and sense requisite to the existence of the objects surrounding it; clothes above all, the obvious, but usually trivialized signs of life, which remain in the body's place, in the place vacated by it, empty and useless. The independent existence of clothes, alongside the body's life, begins at birth, starting with little baby clothes and moving on to bigger and bigger ones. Clothes — there are always some bodies putting them on, wearing them, desiring them, striving to get them, taking possession of them, discarding, storing, inheriting. Nearly all their life bodies never part with what clothes, adorns and protects them, what is closest to them, next to the skin, what absorbs its smell, grime and sweat.

• The objects left by the body, the clothes saturated with its physicality — are they not the most obvious and tangible traces of its reality, the proof of its existence? Is the material world coexisting with the body not its most faithful memory? The sense of this world disappears with the passing of a particular life, although it can be reborn with the life of new bodies. One moment, a freeze frame of the stream of life changes forever the state of the subject and object. It is maybe the most strongly felt — physically and psychically — end of the stream of the time of life, flowing in between, in space and time..

• Kim Sooja: "We are wrapped in cotton cloth at birth, we wear it until we die, and we are again wrapped in it for burial. Especially in Korea, we use cloth as a symbolic material on important occasions such as coming of age ceremonies, weddings, funerals, and rites for ancestors. Therefore cloth is thought to be more than a material, being identified with the body - that is, as a container for the spirit. When a person dies, his family burns the clothes and sheets he used. This may have the symbolic meaning of sending his body and spirit to the sky, the world of the sky, the world of the unknown."

• Scattered clothes and bottari, bundles stuffed with clothes, made of traditional Korean fabrics, are spread on the ground in a forest during the First Biennial in Kwangju in 1995. This installation, made of 2.5 tonnes of second-hand clothes and entitled Sewing into Walking was dedicated by Kim Sooja to the victims of the suppression of a democratic protest in Kwangju in 1980. The tragedy of those victims was expressed by an installation made of a mass of used clothes, those most obvious signs of the presence of a body.

• Kim Sooja, e-mail, April 1, 2003:

• The Kwangju Massacre happened in the 1980 and hundreds of people died for their democracy movement. When I was invited from Kwangju, I couldn't do anything before I commemorate their lives...

• Deductive Object-dedicated to my neighbours was done in 1996 when the department store was completely collapsed and killed hundreds of people and I was in that building with my son 30 mins before collapse, and we used to live in the same block. I had to comment and commemorate the victims of my neighbours especially when I had an occasion to install my piece in Japan which had a lot to do with Korea in the history (war, colonization, conflict ...). So the neighbour means both my own neighbour in Seoul but also Korea-Japan relationship, so I mixed the Korean used clothes with Japanese.

• Kwangju, Seoul and Kosovo are just a few of the many places in the world which have been marked forever by the death of many beings. Kim Sooja sees it, but she does not get involved in political conflicts. So when she presents Bottari Truck — in Exile, a truck loaded with colourful bottari, at the Venice biennial and dedicates that event to the [victims of] the war going on at the same time in Kosovo (so close to Venice), that gesture is just an expression of concern for the lot of other people.

• Kim Sooja conceptualizes political events through installations in which an important element are bottari and traditional Korean bedcovers, objects strongly associated with women and the roles they play (in Korea considerably limited by Confucianism). Another key element of the installation are used clothes, which in Korean tradition are carriers of the spiritual element, and in Kim Sooja's works also become a representation of the human body. Those are, it seems, the only three projects with implied political, social and emotional meanings; all the others are creative acts made concrete as objects, installations, performances and videos; recently, those are becoming increasingly minimalist. An attitude of conscious "inaction" is articulated ever more plainly in the performances realized and registered on video in different places around the world and shown in exhibition rooms.

• In an essay published in this catalogue Adam Szymczyk proposes a new interpretation of the artist's work. Giving descriptions of journalist's reports of the war in Iraq, he confronts Kim's quiet presence with the media clamour accompanying the current political situation in the world. Kim Sooja's media personality is radically different from the way the media operate. In her video performances she shows her body, but remains silent and conceals her face, turning away from the viewers. She seems to be protesting against the noise made by the media and against all acts directed against human beings, including accidental tragedies (such as the collapse of the supermarket in Seoul), expressing her opposition to the pain and suffering accumulated in the clothes.

• Kim Sooja consciously cultivates this attitude by a contemplative perception of the world and a rejection of excess information (e.g. deciding not to read books). She is a nomadic artist, constantly on the move, but she seems to stand firmly on the ground. In fact, her attitude may be interpreted, in a simplified way, as a practical exemplification of Heidegger's being-in-the-world, an existence cast into the world, but conscious of its "spatiality"; concerned, but not frightened; a being open to cognition and "the world's worldliness"; a being which accepts other "beings".

• Kim Sooja: "When I look back over my more than twenty years of handling bedcovers, I feel that I have always been performing, guided by the piles of cloth I haved live among. What in the world have I stitched and patched. What have I tied up in bundles. When will the journey of my needle end, my silkworm unwrap its flesh. Will it in the end slough off its skin. Will the boundless with no destinations find theirs ways to go."

• Looking at the twenty years of Kim Sooja's work we can see that they form a consistent process. After art studies in Seoul, until about 1992, Kim Sooja makes abstract collage using traditional Korean fabrics and clothes. She combines sewing as a technique with drawing and painting. In those pieces sewing becomes not only a direct way of creating form, but a constitutive element defining her work. The use of this unique technique, associated rather with gender art, women's art, is blends with the artist's personal experience, taken from her family home, of sewing the traditional bedspreads together with her mother and grandmother. She sews her first objects from inherited clothes and bedspreads.

• Kim Sooja's early collages come in different geometrical shapes, as flat reliefs, their surfaces made of bits of fabric sewn together, painted in ink or covered with abstract drawings — The Earth and the Heaven (1984), Blue (1987), Black (1987). In the 1990s they are gradually transformed into three-dimensional objects, assemblages, which, although they can be hung like paintings, have a richer texture, as they consist of larger pieces of cloth, creased, draped in a baroque fashion, fastened to the base. They form a crumpled, crammed, multicoloured mass, suggestive of an abstract flower (Toward the Flower, 1992), of earth, (Toward the Mother Earth, 1990-1991), of a portrait (Portrait, 1991), or carrying even more metaphorical meanings (Mind and the World, 1991). Some of them are objects leaning against the wall or propped up with bamboo sticks. As such, they already belong to the genre of installation — between the reality of a two-dimensional wall and space.

• At the same time, from about 1991 Kim Sooja starts creating spatial objects and installations, leaving the painting and more or less flat textile compositions almost entirely behind. Those new compositions feature ready-made objects, always covered, wrapped up, rolled up in cloth (among others, a ladder, part of a rowing boat, a table, some tools and many old-fashioned objects of everyday use, which the artist treats with nostalgia, as the most precious traces of life and also as beautiful forms.) A series of those objects is called Deductive Object; it was afterwards expanded to include spatial objects made solely of fabrics. Needles, cloth, threads, sewing, sewing together, wrapping, covering, unfolding and spreading define Kim Sooja's artistic activities.

• Kim Sooja, e-mail, April 2, 2003

• "Korean traditional wrapping cloth is 'Bojagi'( I prefer to use this way although people used to call it Pojagi - now Koreans try to match with the actual pronunciation of (Po)jagi and (Bo)ttari is same letter and pronunciation in Korea. Bojagi is traditionally used as wrapping cloth which was made out of small pieces of cloth sawn by anonymous women. But I used only used bedcovers which are made for the newly married couples.

• 'Bottari' is a wrapped bundle but normally people wrap households, cloth, clothes, books, gifts,...whatever, but my bundle is wrapped used clothes from anonymous people — I used yellow pages and white pages from New York in 1993 before I leave NYC as if wrapping people in New York."

• A turning point in Kim Sooja's work was her exhibition in P.S. 1 Studio in New York in 1992. There, beside earlier work, she presented bottari made of traditional Korean bedspreads, filled with clothes. She also exhibited pictures, assemblage and even a kind of "tableau" made of crumpled fabrics, stuck to a surface and partly extending beyond the frame, as if pulled out of the inside of the picture. It was through those objects that a symbolic disruption of frames was effected. A year later at the Ise Art Foundation in New York Kim Sooja shows only a massive bottari, provocative not only in its shape, but also through the intensive red of the rectangular piece of fabric.

• In the early 1990s Kim Sooja departs completely from the closed form of "tableau" with its limitations, and devotes herself to multi-directional exploration of space. The group exhibition "In Their Own Images" at the P.S.1 Museum in New York (1994) marks the starting point of Kim Sooja's new experiment with the "spatiality" and intimacy of a wall. Deductive Object — scraps of cloth filling cracks in a wall — is used by her at the 5th Biennial in Istanbul in 1997. While at the P.S.1 Museum colourful bits of fabrics protruded blithely beyond the wall, in Istanbul the blend discreetly with the old walls of the Hagia Eireni museum, becoming no more than patches of colour, hardly visible in the arcaded corridor. The association between those scraps stuck in the cracks of a wall with the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is rather obvious.

• Since the exhibitions at the P.S.1 Studio (1992) and the ISE Art Foundation (1993) Kim Sooja increasingly often exhibits bottari entitled Deductive Object, arranging them in different ways: a solitary bottari in a gallery (Museum Fridericianum, Kasel, 1998), one combined with bedcovers spread on the floor (Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, 1996 and the 5th Biennial in Lyon, 2000); crammed (Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, 1994), or against the background of a landscape, where they evoke their basic function: a practical means of transporting the most necessary things or one's all belongings, thus becoming a symbol of nomadism (Yongyou, Korea, 1995), and finally in combination with a video installation at the Seomi Gallery in Seoul (1994), consisting of bottari, monitors and scattered clothes. It was that installation, entitled Sewing into Walking, that anticipated the one dedicated to the victims of the Kwangju Massacre.

• Apart form bottari, the most important thing are the traditional Korean bedspreads — to the artist, symbols of woman, of sex, love, the body at rest, sleep, privacy, fertility, longevity and health. They can also be interpreted as a special kind of traces of life. They are used fabrics — extraordinary witnesses of life, birth and death. At the artist's second individual exhibition at the Hyunday Gallery (1991) a single one of those is hung, together with old, sentimental objects. Then we encounter a whole mass of them, forming a patch of colourful fabrics. Long before, Sooja ties them into bottari, spreads them on the grass with deliberately slow gestures (performance Sewing into Walking, 1994). In recent years, they most often appear in installations such as A Laundry Woman, a simple presentation of a number of cloths hung out in the gallery to resemble drying linen. Is that not a metaphor for the roles of woman in Korean society, and women's roles in general? All the time Kim Sooja imitates women's activities in spare, minimalist gestures: she spreads, ties, folds, hangs out.

• In November 1997 Kim Sooja takes an 11-day performance-trip around Korea in a truck. The 33-minute video from that trip is a record of the views of the truck with its load of colourful bottari. Possibly, Kim Sooja is making a journey into the past, going back to the journeys which her family was obliged to embark on following her father, an Army man working in the demilitarized zone. At the same time it is a metaphor for her current life — the life of a nomad artist, crossing ever new borders in order to meet new people. That aspect of nomadism, shown in Kim Sooja's performances, in installations using the symbolic bottari and in videos, is one of the key points of her art. Such nomadism takes place in open spaces and needs them to come into being, although it is confronted with the horizontal plan of the world and the limitations imposed by the organization of space by the "state".

• Kim Sooja's videos are a record of performances happening in various cities and places around the world. Kim appears in them with her back to the camera. She is the woman who stands among passers-by or lies on a rock in Kitakyushu (A Needle Woman); the woman who sits on the pavement and begs in Cairo and Mexico (A Beggar Woman); the woman lying in the street in Delhi and Cairo (A Homeless Woman) and standing by the river in Delhi (A Laundry Woman).

• As a figure against the background of the filmed spaces and people she is clearly distinct from their rhythm, their movement, their image. That is an effect of the medium of communication — video, which produces a flat and illusion-like picture. It is also due to the artist taking on the role of the "other" or even "stranger", and the position of the motionless figure — in the foreground — further prevents her from integrating with the surroundings. There is no sound from the crowded streets and the landscapes in which we see Kim Sooja; she reduces the reception to pure vision. We do not know who's filming her; if it were not for the artist's figure in the centre of the picture, it could be perceived as the record of an anonymous security camera, continuously controlling the streets, filming live with no scenario. All the passers-by, inhabitants of great cities, are filmed and become unwitting actors.

• In the video A Needle Woman (1999-2001) the artist stands in crowded streets. Her complete immobility contrasts with the movement and noise of the metropolis, but the noise we can only guess at. The camera films the masses of bodies making their way along the streets of London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Lagos, New York, Cairo, Mexico City, Delhi. In Tokyo, the crowd does not get thinner even during the sultry summer. It moves smoothly, pattering and shuffling in a characteristic Japanese way. In the evenings, what sounds like one huge conversation hovers over the city, intermingled with street sounds.

• In Kim Sooja's video, however, we will not hear Tokyo. In this, as in other films, instead of the sounds and the artist's face, we are shown her body and the face of the anonymous crowd. Thousands of people walk towards her, enter the frame and disappear after a moment. The video takes on the role of a sociologist's record — it shows the reactions of the crowd in confrontation with "another". In London, New York and Mexico City that crowd passes Kim Sooja ignoring her almost entirely. Similarly in Tokyo — here the indifference is greatest (no wonder many street performances were held here, for example by the group HiRed Center, to "activate" the street and the crowd). In Shanghai, Delhi and Cairo the crowd shows more interest; sometimes somebody turns, or stops for a while to stare. It is in Lagos that Kim Sooja arouses the greatest curiosity. Freeze frames from the video show not a crowd, but individual faces, feelings, reactions. In Tokyo, a smiling Japanese woman's face appearing for a moment is the only instance of emotion in the anonymous crowd. In Cairo the camera registers little events: somebody meets somebody, there is a warm greeting etc. Those are the most fascinating observations that Kim Sooja presents us with. On the other hand, it is well known what hostility and aggression a "crowd" can show: against itself as a whole, but also against the individuals that constitute it. Those video records and the artist's attitude express a sort of protest and something that stems from her affirmation of the world and total "being-in-the-world". There is also something innocent and naïve about them, and certainly something brave. Kim Sooja may not pose the question, but it would be difficult not to ask ourselves: why do stranger bodies incite so much hatred in us?

• In A Beggar Woman Sooja begs on the streets of Lagos, Cairo, Mexico. In Cairo, two issues coincide: the problem of gender and of cultural differences. Kim — a woman, an "other" is surrounded solely by men, younger and older; a crowd of them encircle her body so that at times the motionless figure is no longer visible. In A Homeless Woman, shot in Delhi and Cairo, it is in Cairo that the homeless woman excites greatest interests. A group of men can not restrain their curiosity: they talk, they stare, even directly into the camera.

• Kim Sooja makes her presence in the world noticeable through the continuity of repeated situations and shots of her own unchanging image: a figure standing among people or against a natural background. People bring in their own physicality and materiality into her works, and so does nature. It is a manifestation of various ways of being in the world. In that way Kim Sooja points to the basic problems of existence: that we are always alone, but also, that we always have the world and people around us.

• On March 24, 2003 the police in New York arrested a hundred and forty participants of an anti-war demonstration, who had lain down in Fifth Avenue, blocking traffic and bringing the city to a standstill.

• The demonstrators lay motionless on their backs; some were holding photographs of civilian war casualties in Iraq. Police officers lifted them off the ground and carried them into cars, slowly making their way along the body-strewn street. That "die-in" demonstration was one of hundreds of bigger and smaller manifestations of civil disobedience which swept over cities in all parts of the world in response to the war waged under American leadership in Iraq.

• An act of civil disobedience consists in an ostentatious and consistent breach of the existing law. The disturbance is deliberate and limited in scope. Such an act of disobedience may be compared to a well-posed question. When it is one carefully chosen element of the system that becomes the object of criticism, the act is expressive and effective in exposing a false, albeit legally sanctioned, state of affairs.

• A special form of civil disobedience are demonstrations in which a group of people temporarily occupies a section of public space to which they have no right at that moment. This includes such forms of protest as "sit-in", popularized by the American movement against racial segregation in the 1960s (the iconic sit-in by four black citizens, known as the "Greensboro Four", started at the counter of a white-only bar in Woolworth's department store on the first of February 1960) and then adopted by the student revolt of 1968, or "be-in", demonstration through being together (creatively) in a certain area - from mass gatherings of hippies (the most famous one took place in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on the 14 of January 1967) to the occupation of premises, which is also a form of pressure through occupying space the right to which is disputed. Occupying a place in defiance of the norms regulating its use is an expression of the wish to be able to decide maters important to that place and to the people in it. New York's "die-in" dramatizes the risk of participants being run over by cars, but its main point is made through the clash between the concrete image of demonstrators lying in a street symbolizing ultimate material wealth and the vision of a heap of bodies - the clich image of how war affects civilians in a poor country. The renunciation of violence expressed in the form of a theatrical death on an improvised stage acquires the force of an ultimatum.

• Quiet and persevering like stones which no one throws, Kim Sooja's works inevitably resonate with various forms of symbolic behaviour through which active members of civil society respond to the definitions of war put forward in media commentaries, using military metaphors of movement, and to the summary interpretations which politicians direct through the same media - always downwards, like bombs, leaflets and food supplies. One of the most suggestive images revealing this one-way movement - from the top down - is the agency photo of a truck, from which charity workers are throwing food parcels directly into the outstretched hands of hungry people. At the very top, on the roof of the truck, a group of reporters are standing, pointing their cameras down. It is easy to imagine what this scene, filmed from the roof of the truck, would look like on a TV screen: it would be us, the kindly viewers, who would be handing out food through other's hands to the people in need.

• Kim Sooja stages her presence as a gap: motionless "being-in", which is gradually removed from the onlooker's field of vision, becoming something as known and obvious as the place itself. Being in a place becomes the place. Like the surface of water closes over a stone, like the eye fills in a blind spot for us. By remaining in a place, being gains a right to it, not through some special title located outside the place, in the space of ideology and codified law, but because it becomes a place, for some time a certain place in uncertain times and in places of uncertainty, in cities on the move. Sewing and travelling across (borders), begging in (the streets), lying on (a rock) and under (the sky), sitting under (a tree), standing in front of (a marching crowd). Sewing the top to the bottom, sewing with oneself, with a disappearing stitch, a blind stitch.

• A typical TV report from the front lines: after many hardships a journalist managed to get there; his tired, happy face confirms the truth of his account. Wearing a helmet and a bullet-proof vest, the reporter grips a microphone. Although he's often dressed in camouflage, he is unarmed and that's why we should trust him. The reporter looks us in the eye and speaks to us. Behind him there is action, or just an epilogue or prologue to action. The movement of vehicles, of soldiers, of civilians, burnt-out ruins, wrecked equipment, a captured bridge, some children. The caption on the screen removes all doubt as to the place: a specific geographical name combined with a concrete person who is there and is talking to us now. There can be no more doubt: this is presence and we are experiencing it.

• In a series of films shot in different cities around the world Kim Sooja does not show her face. A static camera films a motionless, standing figure from behind. The black vertical shape in the centre of the screen partially blocks the view. On the edges of the screen a crowd throngs; we see it fragmentarily, between the edge of the frame and the dark figure in the middle, on which it is hard to focus. Our view of the scene taking place here is as if "delegated" to that person, about whom we don't know much, not being able to see her face. We don't even know if her eyes are open, if she is looking. She's just a stubborn presence, a gap in our field of vision, standing between us and the image we want to see in its entirety. It's someone who is standing in front of us and whom we want to push aside to be able to see more. Kim Sooja leaves us with this sense of partial knowledge, which will not be made complete.

• Her works make one think of the analogies between ways of working with human presence in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s and various forms of demonstrating civil disobedience through a political staging of human presence with reference to a given context.

• In 1970 Adrian Piper decided to "become the object of art" and to stop making objects. In a series of performances realized in various public places (street, bar, bus stop etc.) the artist used herself as a "persona" slightly disrupting the usual order of things and testing the reactions of onlookers to the appearance of the Other. In Catalysis III (1970) she entered a department store wearing clothes covered in white paint, with the sign WET PAINT. The situations arranged by Adrian Piper were direct interventions by the black artist in the falsified sphere of aesthetics and custom, which conceal violence.

• Kim Sooja also confronts the possibility of violence and responds to it with her directed personality. In Beggar Woman (Lagos, Nigeria) Kim Sooja sits in the street with her hand outstretched, in a beggar's pose. At the beginning the hand is empty; then someone puts some coins into it; the hand does not close, so somebody else steals them. In this microsituation, apart from economic motivations, issues of trust and responsibility emerge. The beggar's hand becomes a place of transit, an intermediate point/spot in the transit of money. It accepts and offers a gift. The beggar creates a certain community. Abstaining from the usual begging activity - the game of persuasion and resistance - she establishes a network of relations, sets a whole business operation in motion around herself. Kim Sooja's work is also reminiscent of the Real Money Piece (1969) be Lee Lozano, who started with 585 dollars in a jar. The people she met could either take out or add money to the jar; the circumstances, names and sums were recorded. An economic circulation was created, undermining the economy from inside.

• If we define art stemming from a minimalist syndrome of progressive self-questioning of the object and focusing on the conditions of its presentation as, using Dennis Oppenheim's words, "displacement of sensory pressures from object to place", Kim Sooja's works certainly initiate a move of attention from object to place. Kim Sooja attracts our attention only to transfer it entirely to the place where she is.