♪ethereal ambient music♪
[interpreter VO] I've just been noticing
that my life is just one big echo.
♪sparse ethereal music♪ Or, rather, maybe just small
echoes that become one big echo,
and that's something that's been a part of my life
since I was born.
And it has to deal with repetition,
♪♪♪
patterns,
something that constantly comes up.
When I work with interpreters,
I experience repetition.
Like, whatever I sign, Beth repeats.
She's echoing me.
And sign language is full of echoes.
You can use one hand shape,
and echo that, repeat that,
and it just changes the entire
sign or the entire word based on
where you put it on your body.
♪♪♪
The shape of the sign for "future,"
which is two semicircles away from your face,
that's the sign for "future,"
it has a line that you can follow,
so I drew that line.
And it's an echo in and of itself.
♪♪♪
And so since it's my ideas,
it's my work that's being presented,
and a lot of it does have to do
with repetition and a lot of it
is full of echoes,
I think that is why I want to be
as clear as possible. [chuckles]
♪pulsating ethereal music♪ - [Interpreter] I'm DJ Kurs of Deaf West Theater.
At Deaf West Theater,
we bridge deaf and hearing worlds through theater.
We're advancing visibility and representation.
But I'm jealous of Christine Sun Kim,
because she does the same thing,
but on her own.
She can draw a pie chart on paper
and have a similar impact.
Please welcome artist Christine Sun Kim.
[applause]
- [Christine] So this tweet here that says,
"I can 100 percent promise that you
"learning sign language is easier
"than a deaf person learning to hear"
is a tweet from a deaf writer,
and I think that this framing ...is it. [chuckles]
This is how I want you
to think about who I am.
This is my deaf identity,
and this is where I'm coming from.
♪sparse piano music♪
People love to always
ask why I don't read lips,
so this is a question I've
gotten over and over again.
♪♪♪
I love the use of infographics.
It's this idea, shown visually,
that can be communicated without barriers.
It can cross languages,
it can cross cultures.
So this is the same old [bleep]
hearing people say to me.
And as you can see,
this is equally distributed because
people say a lot of [bleep] to me.
[laughter] ♪ethereal synth music♪
- [Interpreter] They look so good!
- [Man] Cute! -[interpreter] [laughs]
- [Christine] Can you lift yours up more,
just a smidgen?
Yes.
Okay, that's what we want.
-That one up. - [Man] This might be low.
- [Interpreter] She hasn't mentioned yours.
- [Man] Okay.
- [interpreter VO] I am very comfortable with collaboration.
[interpreter] I think that looks good.
[interpreter VO] I usually work with people,
whether that's interpreters that
I'm working with or people who
are speaking on my behalf.
I'm used to that.
♪♪♪
I collaborate with my partner, Tom Mader, a lot
and this has been really
nice because I've been able
to kind of increase who I collaborate with.
♪♪♪ - So, we've all grown as artists,
and lecturers and performers,
so let's not do that,
but it's still very easy
to find online.
- [interpreter VO] Motherhood has really impacted my practice.
It's impacted the way I envision
and the way I approach art.
♪♪♪
I allow my child to be a part of the process at times.
Sometimes we collaborate on a project.
♪♪♪
Often, I work with musical notation.
I've really thought about the emptiness of the staff lines.
It's not about the notes, necessarily,
but it's about the foundation that's being laid.
And I decided to incorporate our family.
I've done one,
Tom has done one,
and Roux has done one.
When I sat down with Roux
and I explained the work,
she created this drawing,
and then she did another one with notes on it.
And I asked her what it was,
and she said to me
it was a song about family.
[laughter]
I've lived in Berlin
now for almost 10 years.
As an artist, I'm having a great life there,
because I feel like
there's so much less pressure.
♪bubbly synth music♪ What I've noticed is that being
a parent doesn't have a dent
or an impact on my bank
account almost at all.
Daycare is free.
Everything in the city is affordable,
[chuckles] especially compared to a place like New York
or Los Angeles.
And I also have space to create work.
♪♪♪
So, with all of that,
I've just found myself recognizing more
and more the benefits of a government
that supports their citizens.
Like, actually supports their people.
People in Germany aren't in debt.
But here in the US,
I see friends living here who have more than one job
just to make ends meet,
and I realize that I'm angry about debt,
I'm angry that people are living
like this because I'm not.
I think about my family, my friends,
my future, and I'm worried.
[indistinct chatter]
- I was so happy to hear from you.
Of course I had to call.
And I think all my friends
are coming in next week to see your work.
- [interpreter VO] A perk of being a member
of the deaf community is that you
have this shared culture,
this shared language.
And so people like to stay there.
They don't want to be oppressed
in the way that they are in the hearing community.
But you kind of get trapped.
Sometimes you get
stuck in that echo,
and I was there for a while.
But then, I became an artist,
and I had to go into
the hearing world.
♪uplifting synth music♪
I'm always a little bit
jealous of artists who have
the privilege to be misunderstood.
For me, I automatically feel
like I need to explain what things mean.
I have to say, "No, it's not this, it's that."
And I think that stems
from a place of how misunderstandings
can affect my rights,
all these little things in my daily life,
as well as navigating access,
education, entertainment, family.
Growing up, I loved art,
but I didn't really take
classes 'cause there weren't
interpreters available.
♪tender music♪ I remember when I was in high school,
there was a sculpture class that
I wanted to take that I thought was perfect.
I wanted to work with my hands.
They said no.
Then, as an undergrad
majoring in graphic design,
they had a night class
that I wanted to take.
They said no.
So it was interesting.
At that time, I kept getting told no.
And then when I grew up
and moved to New York,
it was super crowded,
and there was hearing people everywhere,
which wasn't my experience
growing up in California.
And so I had to figure out how
to constantly communicate with
these hearing people.
And people were just in my face,
and I was in people's faces.
Because of that, I just had less fear around it.
♪uplifting music♪
And what I've realized is that
New York gave me the skills to navigate through
the world fearlessly.
[mechanical whirring]
When Hitomi, the curator here at Queens Museum,
reached out to me and we were
corresponding back and forth,
I thought, "How could I come up
"with an idea without actually
"physically visiting the Queens Museum?"
[indistinct chatter]
And in her correspondence,
she mentioned that Queens
was the epicenter of COVID for a while,
and that really struck me and got me thinking.
[honking] [siren]
I thought about rest.
I'm also seeing people being
overworked during the pandemic,
without maybe having health insurance.
♪soft pensive music♪ Lately, I've been into motion lines.
♪♪♪
You can find those in
comic strips or comic books.
And I thought they were a perfect reflection
of sign language, and how it carries
a lot of weight and emotion.
For example, the sign for "time."
I tap my wrist with my index finger.
I looked at a bunch of different
signs that come into contact
with the body,
and I came up with a one-line poem
to fit the current climate
and what was happening in this area.
"Time owes me rest again."
♪♪♪ - [woman] Yeah, maybe you
can shave a little bit.
Yeah, bottom, bottom part.
- [interpreter VO] This experience made me think I can
work with such a large scale.
I thought a lot about that.
And it felt right that maybe
this is the best way where we
can shove or force our deafness
or our existence
or our deaf voice,
and do that in their everyday lives,
in their everyday space.
And it happened that the Manchester International Festival
reached out to me wanting to work together,
saying that I could
show any work I wanted.
And I was like, "All right,
"let me aim for the biggest thing I can do."
I said, "Let's caption the city."
♪♪♪
I want people to see captions,
to think about why they're there,
to think about who might want them.
"Oh, yeah!
"Deaf people."
My favorite one is this
'cause I wanted it all, I wanted more.
I was like, "Let's caption
"the sky and get a plane."
♪♪♪
And doing all that work has
given me the realization that
scale equals visibility,
and that has the ability
to shape social norms.
I want deaf lives to be in your mind,
and be part of what we consider acceptable,
what's normal.
♪uplifting music♪ If you don't see us,
we have no place to be,
and I think that's why
I've gotten into scale,
and also, I'm just greedy, too.
[crowd laughing] ♪ethereal ambient music♪
♪♪♪
Hello, my name is Azikiwe Mohammed.
I am happy to have been featured by Art21 in their series New York Close Up.
As you may or may not have seen, I do a lot of different stuff,
and trying to explain it to people can be a little chewy sometimes.
Now, I can say I make a lot of stuff and then point them
somewhere.
That is all thanks to Art21.
If you like watching people make some stuff,
Art21 is an unlimited 24/7 resource of all kinds of stuff from all different people.
There's educational resources, engaging public programs,
and workshops for teachers that can help bring art into the classroom,
which, very often,
is a burden left on the teachers.
But Art21 helps lift that burden by letting us,
the people who make some of the stuff,
bring some of the stuff into the classroom
via the films and resources that Art21 provides
free of charge.
Art is limitless, and Art21 is for everyone.
Please consider giving to Art21 to help make the stuff that
we make through Art21
available for free to everybody for years and years to come.
Thank you.