Kim Schoen (b. Princeton) received her MFA in Photography from CalArts in 2005, and her MPhil from The Royal College of Art in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as MMoCA; BAM, Brooklyn, New York; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Germany; Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, and MOT International, London; Kunstverein Springhornhof; Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Berlin; The California Museum of Photography, Moskowitz Bayse Gallery, Young Projects and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of international grants and residencies including The Edith-Russ-Haus Stipendium and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work is included in private and public collections (most recently LACMA; acquisition and exhibition in 2022), and has been written about in Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, and Hotshoe International. Her own writing (‘Cracking Walnuts: Nonsense and Repetition in Video Art’, ’The Serial Attitude Redux’, ‘The Expansion of the Instant: Photography, Anxiety, Infinity’) can be found in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Kim is also the co-founder, publisher and editor of MATERIAL, a journal of writing by artists.
Using an experimental approach across video installation, photography, and text, Kim Schoen explores the subject of rhetoric, and the often irrational ways in which the commercial and the personal intersect. She takes on objects and speech that are trying to persuade or convince us of something—and uses them as raw materials to generate new contexts and new sources for meaning.
“While at AiR351, my research will encompass the irrationalities and intricacies of artificial plant production and distribution. I want to work with the Lisbon-based company Darden Importação e Exportação, to film the import and sale of artificial plants. My research will also extend to the artificial ecosystems of The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Garden and Estufa Fria de Lisboa, as well hopefully working with the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Lisbon on the variable rates of decay of natural and petroleum based plants.”