Grace Euna Kim (KR/USA) is a transdisciplinary artist, choreographer, critical researcher, and pedagogue based in Berlin since 2011. Her practice investigates ideology, political embodiment, and affect, with a focus on the micropolitics of perception, empathy, and community within contexts of oppression and resistance.
The object of her artwork is the immersive encounter, and how it is co-created with the viewer's embodied and relational presence and imagination. While welcoming both passive and active engagement, it is devised to be empathetically experienced rather than interactive, thereby inviting people to independently question how individual and collective bodies shape and negotiate meaning, and the politics therein. Using careful ethical approaches with respect to the viewer's agency, she explores the encounter's transformative potential through site-specific immersive performances and interventions in public space, visual arts spaces, performing arts stages, and experimental education- and research-oriented formats. Since 2019 she has developed her long-term choreopolitical research on symbolic violence “Acid Bodies”, which informs the various outputs of her work. In dialogue with Post-Lacanian psychoanalytic and critical theory, she develops 360° body-emergent affective approaches that she describes as “acid choreography”, which mobilize aesthetics as a political mediation between the viewer and social reality, and bring tangibility to psycho-political drives/dimensions of being and movement. Through this lens, the audience is invited to rethink community beyond the limits of dominant, patriarchal, and normalized constructs.
They are offered a space to explore radical modes of togetherness, care, and wonder—embracing the unexpected, the contradictory, and the sublime.
Euna holds an MA in Philosophy, Media and Communication at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has taught theoretical praxis courses at institutions including Weißensee Kunsthochschule (MA Raumstrategien) and PYR FYR School of Performance Moscow, and was a lecturer/mentor at House of Europe, Goethe-Institut Ukraine. She has presented her performances, research, and visual artworks in contexts including Seoul Museum; Incheon Art Platform; Schauspiel Leipzig; Frankfurt Lab; Haus der Statistik (Berlin); ZK/U–Center for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin); SOMA Art Space (Berlin); Cité de l’image–Clervaux (Luxembourg); Galerie Madé (Paris); Museum of Nonconformist Art (St. Petersburg); Solyanka VPA (Moscow); Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona); WhiteBox (New York); ASCA University of Amsterdam; and Foam Magazine/Foam Fotografiemuseum (Amsterdam). She is a recipient of the AHL Foundation Visual Art Award and Foam Talent distinction, and has received research and production grants from Fonds Darstellende Künste, Gwärtler Stiftung, Nationales Performance Netz (NPN), Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture, and Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.
Upcoming / In Development
As of 2025, Euna is in a preparatory phase of development and financing for "Unlearning Violence: Laboratory for Impossible Futures" (Berlin), which she has conceived together with the curator Dr. Marianna Liosi. It is a multi-format and multi-disciplinary project activating public engagement through immersive stage and digital/virtual performances, radical pedagogy, participatory co-creation, and critical discourse. Collaborating institutions include Radialsystem, PSR Kollektiv/Heizhaus, Braunschweig University of Art (HBK), IUAV - University of Architecture Venice, and Diffrakt - Zentrum für theoretische Peripherie. Parallel to this she is developing a short film co-produced by Visar Morina, and a touring workshop series that reimagines resistance and solidarity through radical frameworks of dissensus, erotic politicality, and exhaustion.
Contact
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Email: graceeunakim[at]gmail.com
IG: @grace.euna.kim
All Images © Grace Euna Kim