HIPPOLYTE STUDIO
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue-Fr 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00
9.10.-1.11.2009
NURRI KIM
FeederFeeder is a project dedicated to photographing people that I've made custom lunches for (including depictions of the meal that I cooked for them and what they would usually have for their lunch) from 2006 to the present. Most of the people that you see in this gallery are people I've shared my daily environment with, first in New York and now in Helsinki.
When I first started this project, I was working as an institutional archivist in New York City. It was only my second job in America, and I was having a hard time with some of the awkward human interactions I experienced in the office environment.
Among many other frustrations, I felt disconnected from the people I was working with. The office is quite a strange and artificial social environment: we see each other every day and share a relatively small space, but we don't really know that much about each other. So I thought that I wanted to do something about that frustration of communication, and tried to come up with some of way of transforming that mundane, dead-end relationship into something more intimate and memorable.
I decided to invite each of the people around me to receive a lunch meal, chosen by them, that I would cook and serve free of charge. I chose lunch because cooking and eating is on the one hand something quite intimate, but also an easily shareable experience - all of us have to eat, every day. Because "you are what you eat," and it's one of the most charged issues in our lives, I thought I'd get the chance to peek my participants' life routines and learn something about each one of them through their food choices. This is the way the project I call Feeder started.
I photographed each step of the process, following a rigorous set of rules. The complete set of images for each participant consists of their hand-written questionnaire, their usual lunch (which I ate for reference as much I could), the customized lunch I prepared in accordance with their desires, and a portrait of them in the working environment.
Overall, Feeder succeeded in challenging the boundaries between myself and the others around me. By thinking of the final customized lunchbox as something like an edible monument, it was also my way of pushing back at the idea that some activities are deserving of monuments while others are not - the latter generally things like meal preparation which are considered trivial work, suited only for women or immigrants. Finally, it was a great way of learning tons of new recipes.
Nurri Kim
p.s. During the course of this exhibition, I'll be accepting four volunteer participants to receive custom lunchboxes as part of the ongoing Feeder project.
Nurri Kim was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1973. She thinks of her work as an archeology of the moment, with the aim of restoring to awareness "the things that we see too often, and then forget to see." Her work has been exhibited at Insa Art Space in Seoul, the Conflux festival in New York City, the Media Arts Asia Pacific festival in Brisbane, Australia, and the ICANOF media art show in Hachinohe, Japan, among others. A book featuring her project Tokyo Blues will be published in November 2009, followed in 2010 by a book of Feeder, which will include recipes for all of the participants' lunch boxes.
Information and press images:
Hippolyte Studio, +358 9 612 33 44, info[at]hippolyte.fi
