Kim Schoen
Kim Schoen (b. 1969, Princeton) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. She received an MFA from CalArts in 2005, and a Master of Philosophy from the photography department at The Royal College of Art in London in 2008. Her work in photography and video installation has shown at numerous institutions and galleries worldwide including LACMA, MoCA, The Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), Richard Telles Fine Art, Young Projects, Moskowitz Bayse, LM Projects, and LAXART in Los Angeles; MMoCA (Madison Museum of Contemporary Art), BAM, Brooklyn, NY; The South London Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, MOT International in London, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporaneo, Spain; Archive Kabinett, Kunstverein Springhornhof, Kleine Humboldt Galerie, and Edith Russ Haus für Medienkunst. Her work was recently included in LACMA’s collection, and has been written about in Art Forum, The Los Angeles Times, Mousse, and Art in America. Schoen has lectured widely at Otis College of Art & Design, Goldsmiths, CCA, The Royal College of Art, and The School of Visual Arts and has published her own writing on repetition and photography—“The Serial Attitude Redux”, “The Expansion of the Instant: Photography, Anxiety and Infinity” in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, as well as various experimental text works: Tolstoyevsky from Book Works, and E.R.O.S. Press, London. Kim is also the co-founder of and co-editor of MATERIAL, a journal of writing by contemporary artists. She recently received a Grant for Media Art of the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus in 2019 and is in production on a new video work entitled ‘Baragouin.’
Practice Statement
My practice in video installation and photography focuses on rhetoric and display in consumer culture. I use commercial representations as my raw materials, mining their absurdities, mechanics, and latent poetics. I like to look at the often irrational conditions of production, and irrational speech in our mediated landscape.
I am particularly curious about nonsense, about how "saying without meaning" manifests today. Working with video allows me to take on the rhetorical, theatrical, and unexamined ways that the commercial project operates on us—and remake the “sense” of what is given.
Practice includes:
Video installation, photography, writing, curating
Related research & practice areas:
docufiction and creative writing;
language and image;
media and design;
publishing as an art practice;
rhetoric