This is the final part of the interview by artist and curator Loretta Lau.
Kim Engelen reads her text on Sun-Penetrations (Flag).
4:42 Plus a mini-performance-demonstration.
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Kim Engelen: When I was in Kassel in Germany during dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, I went jogging. Because research has pointed out that being active makes you happy. And when I came back and sat down, a sunbeam hit my leg.
Warm and nurturing it was explicitly touching my naked upper thigh. Like the head of a dog lovingly and attentively laying his head on your lap. I did not want to move away. For a brief moment, the tactility grabbed my attention and I stopped thinking. For seconds I felt content and happy.
The photograph in the background is of this moment. And it is also the first photograph of the beginning of my Sun-Penetrations series.
The Sun-Penetrations series are photographs and 1-minute videos of beams of the sun, which penetrate externally into the inner space, through windows, curtains, doors, burned glass, holes, or cracks. Sun-Penetrations deals with loneliness and the visual beauty that lies in the respect for this raw emotion.
Before Covid19 Sun-Penetrations came into existence by my own body traveling and thus living and staying in hotels, motels, artist-in-residencies, and new homes. I have lived, thanks to my art, in 6 countries in Europe, the US, and China. And thus consequently feeling at times, cut off or disconnected.
In Sun-Penetrations the body is inside the home—the private space—when experiencing the sun in her passage of time. Sun-Penetrations move around the perceiving (self) domesticated body and its interpretation of the penetrating sun.
Now during Covid19, this made sense again but from a different perspective. Perhaps an, even more, connecting vibration. Since many of us are now confined.
The flag (behind me) was made in 2015 for my then solo exhibition Sun-Penetrations at Burnrate in Berlin in Germany. It is about 2 meters and 32 centimeters long and 2 meters and 25 centimeters wide (I wrote down in inches: 91.34 by 88.58 inches). And since I am currently indexing my older artworks. Because I will be moving to Spain after the Pandemic—hopefully. I thought this one is very appropriate to show, now, here with you, while we are confined, most of us, to our homes.
During that time we wondered why people would come to see art. We even wondered if people still need to go to shows? Why? We asked these questions from a position of freedom. Since we had the opportunity. Now, this opportunity is gone. We are confined—most of us.
Do we now need the physical interaction with art? Does the "art magic" happen inside the "art space"? Or can and does it now happen inside our homes, online (like with you now),or inside one's brain, inside oneself? The only reason I could give back then is because of the experience. To get out of our cocoon, to get our bodies and maybe also our brains moving. We can't do this now. But artists are smart. And as artists, we are reshaping this experience and finding new ways. It is not for nothing that now during the pandemic an NFT (a Non Fungible Token) is sold at Christie's for millions.
People move like planets next to each other in the same solar system. So in a way we all affect each other. Like the sun, who shoots her sunbeams in a force unimaginable and brings life to earth. Without the sun there would be no life on earth. No life, dead. No, not even no dead but just non-existence. And the sun needs to shine on something to bring this life or to life. Like impregnating sperm shooting life into a fertile woman’s body. The sun travels to earth and we have to exist. We have to make experiences. We want to progress. We are stuck now. Yet the sun finds us. And we keep evolving—even while we are confined to our homes.
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Sun-Penetrations Flag: [ Ссылка ]
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©Kim Engelen, Netherlands, 5 April 2021
