In conversation with Zhu’s commission, Eunsong Kim will trace how racial capitalism and settler colonialism situated the rise of museum collections and conceptual art forms. Linking this trajectory with European models of art institutions, this talk teases out approaches to commissioning, patronage, and display referenced in License to Live.This lecture draws upon interdisciplinary frameworks from critical race & ethnic studies, museum studies to historical materialism. With reference to her new monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press 2024), Professor Kim considers how colonial constructs of race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions.
Biography
Eunsong Kim is the author of gospel of regicide, 2017, and is co-translator (with Sung Gi Kim) of Kim Eon Hee’s Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?, 2019. Kim’s writings have appeared in the anthologies American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), edited by Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy, and Reading Modernism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modern Literature (Springer, 2016), edited by Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan. Kim is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Program, and Yale University’s Poynter Fellowship. In 2021 she cofounded offshootjournal.org, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.