California-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) works in sound, performance, drawing, installation, and video. She considers the sonic as a multi-sensory phenomenon, one whose properties are auditory, visual, and spatial, as well as socially determined. Much of her work is invested in uncovering the politics of voice, listening, and language, troubling throughout conceptions of sound as being inextricably tethered to hearing and the implicit authority of spoken over signed language.

In the List Center exhibition, the artist presents a series of new drawings breaking down the various factors involved in a number of personal decisions (“Why I Do Not Read Lips,” “Why I Work with Sign Language Interpreters”) by relative importance in pie chart form. Simultaneously funny and profound, the works also pivot on the absurdity of capturing complex choices and their cultural, social, and historical underpinnings in diagrammatic shorthand.

Image credit:
Suggested Amount of Allowing Friends to Sing Songs to a Baby, 2018.
© Christine Sun Kim. Photo: Kell Yang-Sammataro