Heekuen Kim’s artistic practice begins with a simple act: entering a space and remaining there until she feels it pushing her back. She intervenes—sometimes barely perceptibly, sometimes quite overtly—in environments that already carry their own weight: it may be an old architectural convention, a social rule, or the quiet force of the familiar. What interests her is not the space as an image or within a design.

When Heekuen Kim walks across the wooden floor of an old chapel, the creaking under her feet rises toward the dome and returns to her. She imagines how long this delay in the sound must have lasted. The creaking of this floor is the record of a charged “tension”—as it were, the accumulated tension left behind by the countless bodies that stood here before her.

She works with this charged “tension” as material. She focuses on capturing what falls away from the body when its habitual expectations are disrupted: A wall lying there like an antipode where a threshold should actually be; the range of vibrations that opens up in a room inside an old castle, where the movements of kneeling and scrubbing the floor remain alive from their own home; or the playful act of blocking an entire street and inviting pedestrians to use a public restroom.

The distinctions that preoccupy Heekuen Kim are not visual. They lie in the spaces in between: between the space she believes herself to be in and the space her body is actually exploring; between the place an image suggests and the place her body’s mass reveals.

Citizenship: Korea
Discipline: Visual Arts
Residence: Session 6 (10.08.-13.09.2026)