Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

For A String of Echo Traps, Kim asked her friend Matt Karmil to compose a score to accompany animations of the sign for “echo” and to convey feelings of being trapped or enclosed. Karmil, a musician, describes the crackling sounds as “a feeling of being in a tube. Each echo . . . is articulated with a pluck; when [they] fill the screen, the intensity of the sounds increase, in terms of brightness and volume, until it is all white and white noise accompanies it.”

Kim initially presented A String of Echo Traps as a large-scale projection on multiple walls that, like the score, aimed to create a sense of being enveloped or overwhelmed. Through this work, she comments on the ongoing failure of societal structures to provide access and support for disabled people, as well as the specific oppressions experienced by Deaf people that have reverberated through generations. Here, rather than being surrounded by the work, visitors in the stairwell move around it, perhaps suggesting the possibility of breaking out of the trap.