Kyungah Ham is the subject of a solo exhibition titled Abstract, Poetry Weapon / Soccer Paintings by soccer ball bouncing over Crocodile River at carlier | gebauer in Madrid, Spain, through July 27, 2019. Ham explores the notion of power in an extrinsic context by working across painting, installation, video, and performance, often incorporating satirical elements to what would otherwise be perceived as politically charged situations. This exhibition will include works from the artist’s signature embroidery paintings series titled SMS Series, along with the video installation Soccer Painting by the Soccer Ball Bouncing Over Crocodile River.

Ham’s works visualize a façade of reality that is part of our presence but remains invisible and expose unstable gap within a society. The artist’s representative multi-colored silk embroidery work, the SMS Series, connotes and camouflages political messages. The camouflaged images deconstruct and distort original images she has collected, which consist of visual messages in a highly abstracted form. The video work Soccer Painting by the Soccer Ball Bouncing over Crocodile River was first shown as a project for Korea Artist Prize at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in 2016. The work features a young soccer player who has escaped North Korea and visualizes invisible vestiges of the boy’s emotions, movement and past experiences. The indefinable reality of the young boy is ultimately visualized through the materiality of the paint. Like warp and weft, the exhibition Abstract, Poetry Weapon / Soccer Paintings by soccer ball bouncing over Crocodile River inevitably interweaves the artist’s reality with that of her practice.