“Lighter Than Air” is an exhibition by Christine Solar Kim and Thomas Mader. The duo’s debut on the gallery brings collectively their newest installations, movies, and drawings.

Kim and Mader’s collaborative observe has lengthy been centered round themes similar to signed and spoken languages, Deaf historical past, video games and phrase play. Approaching the complexities of communication with specificity and nuance, their work usually parodies and questions social stereotypes and prejudices with a humorousness.

The titular phrase “lighter than air” refers to plane similar to balloons and airships and the low density gasses that elevate these aircrafts. On this exhibition, Kim and Mader materialize this idea and the intangible “air” into palpable types, making use of them to the numerous modes of inhalation and exhalation inherent in signed in addition to spoken languages. Playfully likening the delicate bodily actions to the actions of inflating and deflating, Kim and Mader discover methods of getting consideration, the layered which means of the “nostril exhale” in memes and popular culture, physique temperature, and the function of Alexander Graham Bell in Deaf tradition and schooling. 

ATTENTION is a kinetic set up that references two methods of directing consideration in American Signal Language (ASL). By waving a hand downwards and bringing it into one other signer’s  visual field, an individual can sign they need the eye of one other. Moreover, by pointing a finger at one other particular person or factor, a signer can direct consideration to that subject. Based mostly on these indicators, ATTENTION consists of two large inflatable arms intermittently pointing at a worn-down stone. Alternating between inflation and deflation, the choreography of the arms and fingers repeatedly attracts viewers’ consideration. The kinetic dance makes the semantics of American Signal Language spatially and bodily palpable, whereas alluding to the erosion of our real-life consideration spans. Within the different works on view, the artists flip their focus to the respiratory organs—the mouth and nostril. As with their earlier tasks, Kim and Mader join advanced and broader themes associated to signed and spoken languages via using seemingly easy video games and observations of the physique. Language and grammar are central parts within the playful HooHaa and Heatmap, through which the artists make sensible use of the statement that the sound “Hoo” produces a chilly gust of air from the mouth, whereas the sound “Haa” produces a heat gust of air. They join this statement to the complexity of physique features, adjustments in ambient temperature, and speech remedy. The nostril is one other organ that maintains our respiratory system. It sometimes isn’t a physique half that’s instantly related to American Signal Language, but it surely does play an important function within the language’s grammar. Of their drawing Working Gag and sculptural piece Circle Lurks, Kim and Mader borrow meme tradition and web aesthetics to immediately deal with the detrimental results of Alexander Graham Bell’s affect on the Second Worldwide Congress on Schooling of the Deaf (1880) in Milan, which led to the suppression of signed languages internationally for a lot of many years,  in addition to his eugenicist perspective on signal language and Deaf tradition.

at White Space, Beijing
till July 27, 2024