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29/4/2014

Kate Hers Rhee

Berlinische Galerie, Berlin

Over the course of one year (05.06.2013–23.06.2014), the IBB-Videolounge presents 12 artists who have drawn attention to themselves with innovative use of the media film and video in recent years. The selected artists are both established representatives of contemporary video art as well as emerging artists who have scarcely made their mark on Berlin’s active art scene.

In May kate hers RHEE will show four of her works. Language and identity are regular themes in her work. Her videos are often performative and contain transgressive elements. The artist draws material from her own story: she was born in Seoul (Korea), grew up in the United States, and has been living in Berlin for the past few years. Her projects address her “otherness” as an American with Asian roots in different cultural contexts. They relate closely to her experience of traditional attitudes that repeatedly assign her to the role of “outsider”. She uses her external perspective on German society to reveal postcolonial structures and prejudices that are not so obsolete as is commonly assumed.

Works shown at IBB-Videolounge:

Das deutschsprachliche Projekt, 2008
Das deutschsprachliche Projekt is a performance that completely took over the artist’s daily life and was recorded in the form of a video diary. After taking German lessons for less than a year, kate hers RHEE moved to Berlin and decided to speak, read and write nothing but German for the next three months. She kept a record of the experience and of the many frustrations this challenge provoked. The title is itself a clumsy translation of “The German Speaking Project”, flagging up the discrepancies in meaning that occur during transfer from one language or culture to another. The foreign language becomes the medium of her artistic work and serves to examine how we construct our identity: how much do we define ourselves as individuals – and also as a society – through the language we use?

Ach du heilige Scheiße!, 2012
In a broader sense, Ach du heilige Scheiße! (Oh holy shit!) might be seen as a sequel to Das deutschsprachliche Projekt. This work, rather like a YouTube tutorial in format, helps the viewer to learn an essential component of the German language: swearwords. The artist operates like a language teacher practising the intonation of various German curses. If her American pronunciation has its comic side, this is offset by the content of the idioms, some of them highly derogatory: the viewer is torn between laughter and discomfort. As a motif, the speaker’s mouth in extreme close-up references Bruce Nauman’s iconic Lip Synch (1969), taking its place in an artistic tradition of exploring language, image and sound.

7 Drawings, 28 Kisses, 2013
One recurrent feature in kate hers RHEE’s current work is her fascination with the Chocolate Kiss, a piece of confectionery consisting of sweet foam with a chocolate coating. Until a few years ago it was known as a “Nigger’s Kiss” or “Moor’s Head”, and despite their racist connotations these terms are still heard from time to time. For her performance 7 Drawings, 28 Kisses the artist dons an S&M mask to create her live action paintings – but instead of paint she applies squashed Chocolate Kisses. After seemingly harmless beginnings, the process becomes increasingly disagreeable for the artist. This work draws attention to how, through our common use of apparently innocent idioms, discriminatory attitudes towards a section of the population are cemented into place.

(no) regrets, 2014
Reminiscent of Hollis Frampton’s film Nostalgia (1971), where photographs are burned to the sound of anecdotes, kate hers RHEE sticks Chocolate Kisses onto skewers and melts them in a kind of animist ceremony. This act is accompanied by extracts from Mark Twain’s essay The Awful German Language (1880) and his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884). The result is a complex web of references ranging from the 19th-century slave trade to the timeless intractability of the German language. Things come to a head when the slave Jim wins his freedom, visualised by smouldering Chocolate Kisses symbolising the end of racist idiom.

This project has been facilitated by Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB).

Upcoming Artist:
28.05.–23.06.2014: Cathleen Schuster

Image: Ach du heilige Scheiße, 2012 © kate hers RHEE

Susanne Kumar-Sinner
Head of Marketing and Communications
Berlinische Galerie
Fon +49 (0)30-78902-829
Fax +49 (0)30-78902-730
kumar-sinner@berlinischegalerie.de

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