Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’. The sign, which unfolds like a sound wave, can be made by taking the fingers of one hand to reach out and touch and then glide back from the palm of the other upheld hand. The artist observes that, at its most basic level, an echo is a kind of repetition that is produced when a sound hits a surface. In turn, her work addresses how information is received and processed by Deaf people and sign language interpreters. Hand Palm Echo 1 illustrates how the relationship between a Deaf person and an interpreter hinges on the echo created by the interpreter repeating what they hear, or what Kim describes as a series of visual echoes.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound, and exploring oral languages as social currency. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. She further uses sound to explore her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment.
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change...
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings...
Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...