From May 12 to September 3, 2023, the museums of Soissons will host the exhibition “3.5”, the first major museum monograph devoted to artist Kim KototamaLune, accompanied by her collective Bones and Clouds(Jean-Benoist Sallé and Stéphane Baz). “3.5” is built around an unprecedented body of monumental works in glass, using multiple techniques (spun glass, sagging, thermoforming, blowing), enhanced by light effects and video projections. Curated by Clément Thibault and Christophe Brouard, the exhibition has been produced in partnership with MusVerre, Musée du verre contemporain (Sars-Poteries). It is included in the official program of ISEA 2023 – International symposium on Electronic Arts – and is supported by the Fonds Régnier pour la Création.
“3.5” offers an immersion into a fascinating world. Its mediums are glass, video projection, drop shadows and sound, with their singular, ethereal materiality. The forms on display, oscillating between the mathematical abstraction of perfect polygons and the organic abundance of Kim’s “microcosms”, serve as a metaphor for our society – liquid, virtual, ephemeral – and its paradoxes with the body and physicality.
Glass, which Kim KototamaLune works with astonishing virtuosity, spinning into delicate networks, is an eloquent metaphor for our society. Firstly, through its material, silica, which it shares with the silicon used for most of the computer chips that flood our planet. In its transparency, too, in keeping with the ideology of our time and the glass architecture of the places of power. By its fragile strength, too. Strong, but brittle, like a system on its last legs, giving the impression every day that it’s in danger of breaking.
And finally, in its virtuality. Why “3.5”? Because our bodies evolve in a three-dimensional space. And yet, the world is becoming saturated with surfaces that overwhelm them. Screens and mixed, augmented or virtual realities add a layer of information to this three-dimensionality, which then seems a little more. “3.5” is therefore a way of rendering virtuality, in all the thickness that the term has gained since the Internet: the virtual as what is, but on the verge of not being; the virtual as a field of possibilities; the virtual as cyberspace.
This is “3.5”, an experience in the limbo of lesser existences, a mystical attempt to touch that which is beyond our senses. “3.5” is the aesthetic response to a profoundly virtual society; it’s the spirit of time encapsulated in the fragile transparency of glass, in the immateriality of projected images and cast shadows; so many fleeting, precarious moments that hold on to nothing. “3.5” is a microcosm, populated by organisms that seem aquatic, a small intra-uterine theater, the interior of the body glitched by geometries too perfect to be natural.
Funded by the Fonds régnier pour la Création:
D’ici peu…, is a monumental 5-metre-long work in blown and flame-painted glass, resin and metal. This work is both a promise and a threat, confronting us with the unstable state of the world. Here, the beauty and richness of our planet’s living organisms are overhung by a stone that constantly brushes against them, ready to shatter their fragility.
Kim KototamaLune’s work has been inspired by the seabed and human microbiota for many years. Through this work, the Bones and Clouds collective underlines the urgency of becoming aware of our internal ecosystem, our intestinal flora, in order to be sensitized, connected, to our environment and its preservation. “D’ici peu…” echoes our internal and external ecologies.