The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 21-JAN 22

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DEC 21-JAN 22 Issue
The Miraculous The Miraculous: New York

81. Queens

During a residency in Queens in a former public school, a Korean artist trained as a painter finds herself responding in unexpected ways to the space she has been given to work in and the overwhelming sense of cultural and social strangeness she feels in New York. One day she turns her head and notices the bottari, a traditional Korean cloth bundle, sitting in her studio. For the first time she sees that these colorful textiles and even the bundle itself could be the vehicle for art-making. Following this revelation, she tears a textile into hundreds of tiny scraps that she carefully wedges between the bricks on one wall. She then places several bottari bundles around the space, realizing, as she later explains, that each one “was surely a sculpture and a painting.”

(Kimsooja)

Contributor

Raphael Rubinstein

Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in BombThe Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 21-JAN 22

All Issues