AboutS
Statement: I create installations and performances that consider how architecture, land use, and infrastructures establish frameworks for class hierarchies and normativity. My artwork confronts and creates questions around related systems of regulation, distribution of resources, and behaviors of (un)acceptability.
addendum 2026 – I was compelled to add a straight-up artist statement (above) because we are in a more visible oligarchic-led class war now, one year after I wrote the letter (below)….. I felt considering our circumstances, it is important to be more clear and direct about what my life project/concerns are.
“Artist”. love letter writer
Hi lovers! Thanks for visiting. I’m Kim. i am an art worker, and teach and write and do some other things. It has taken years for me to write this “about” section (added in 2025) because i think it’s flawed to explain my life work with some sort of swift clarity or provide a discreet timeline as if artist-cum-brand – I guess I simply refuse to be condensed. And, these website things lack the ability to address the knotty labyrinth of experience, as if boxes and titles and lists can be the forever all-at-once reveal that are supposed illuminate a much more complex process of making, listening, reading, being, and working with others. Of course, in some ways, it makes a lot of sense to me this perpetual out-of-timeness, since the world and self and desire are not constituted through rationality. There is just no adequate way to constitute art-making into info-aggregates in the deficient architecture of websites and online management systems. Despite this, i did squeeze in visual and written stuff into boxes for you to cannibalize info in some discreet way, or make coherence, or consume. I am very hesitant to give any kind of personalized “about” statement, because i don’t agree with how architectures of identity and hierarchy are utilized by (larger) institutions to keep us from peacefully co-existing and co-supporting, much less unify against much greater issues in a culture that promotes hyper-individualism, rather than cohesion that could help push back against oppressive structures. Socio-political pressures are such crazy psycho-surrealist distortions…. with severe consequences. What i will say about my work is that i am interested in “We the Masses” as the ultra-fungible bodies of late capitalist emperialism, and even more so, am fascinated by the apocalypse (or “the end” and what happens after), and the world has always been ending for some and not for others (plants & animals included). i believe we all need to continue the fight to learn about and share/celebrate our differences. And find better ways to endure in the madness together.
i suppose this website is a catalogue of sorts, a collection and archive that needs visibility because i have to think about practicalities and my own rented life much much more than is comfortable (indentured academic servitude anyone?… happy i’m not alone!?). Compiling info and metadata for “the public” in this short-term rental feels like one piece of being pursued by an unevenly distributed catastrophe. Honestly, i am often lazy about adding info in a timely way, because i think living breathing acts of daily shaping feels much more critical in this limited planetary atomized timeline we’re all subject to. i would prefer just leveling the playing field so that all artists can do what they desire (including myself), but i don’t have that power, and i’m not sure that its even possible in our continual class war and libidinal economies constituted by difference. Instead, i attempt to spend “free” time exploring other things inside and outside of our realms of what might constitute art-making and living. i truly wish you and i had more time to do just this kind of thing. If this site doesn’t provide what you were looking for, please check out those online aberrations with some of that web search spidering and reconstituted AI messiness for other unreliable smatterings of information, or you can really just directly drop me a line. i’m just one click away.
Stay curious and complex and fierce and compassionate! We all need more practice playing with and inside possibilities. Take care of yourself and please do be responsible with others, its super crazy out there.
xoxoo, kim
+ AroundS
(semi-recent news)
2026: more artworks are being schemed…. as always. If I had money so much more would happen! fer realz
2024 Recipient: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant ….. sooooooo much gratitude to the foundation and secret letter writers for supporting my work and future!! Everything I’m doing now is still attached to getting this crucial funding now 2+ years ago.
Other Life Upgrades: no-thing, nada, rien, oh another new job. Still looking for stability, not even continuity.
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listen
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listen?
Kim Zumpfe 