Ken Lum, I’m Always Waiting, 2021. Digital print with wheatpaste, 120 x 192 in.
Within the context of Ulises: Assembly, a publicly-displayed billboard on the SMFA building from Ulises collaborator Ken Lum highlight the internal negotiations, compromises, and necessities that twenty-first century labor demands from its workers, while also emphasizing the humanizing aspects of particular circumstances. As Ulises explores collective labor, this billboard exemplifies its layered nature. The sources below provide further context on his practice, his writings, and his philosophy on public art.
Ken Lum, I’m Always Waiting, 2021. Billboard with Wheatpaste, 120 x 192 in.
Sitting and waiting, the figure in this billboard embodies moments in-between labor time—an experience feels all too present in our contemporary existence. I’m Always Waiting is part of a five-part poster series “Time. And again.” by Canadian artist Ken Lum featuring photographs the artist shot in Antwerp aligned with text. The texts focus on how the subject consider their work—the anxieties, pressures, and challenges. Within the context of the larger series title conveying repeated time, I’m Always Waiting refers to a state of precarity in perpetuity. At the same time, the sitting figure could also be relaxing—highlighting the duality, gaps, and tensions embedded in Lum’s image and text works. While waiting is a lived reality for artists within gigwork economies, but it can also function as a generative space of potentiality.
Ken Lum’s I’m Always Waiting is part of the exhibition Ulises: Assembly, on view at TUAG, August 13–November 10, 2024 examining the labor of bookworkers and bookcarers through the question: “what do you do?” Both Lum and Ulises collective examine how text and image operate in tandem and in tension through collaborative labor.
Ken Lum was born in 1956 in Vancouver, Canada. He lives and works in Philadelphia, USA, where he is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Over the past thirty years, his work was shown at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, the Carnegie Triennial, the Sydney Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Liverpool Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Moscow Biennale, and the Whitney Biennale.
In 2020, he published “Everything is Relevant. Writings on Art and Life 1991–2018,” a collection of essays and lectures was published by Concordia University Press. Together with Paul Farber, Ken Lum is the founder of Monument Lab, an organization dedicated to the historical study and contemporary creation of art in public space.
Resources on the work of Ken Lum
Everything Is Relevant by
Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018 brings together texts by Canadian artist Ken Lum. They include a letter to an editor, diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, curatorial statements, and more. Along the way, the reader learns about late modern, postmodern, and contemporary art practices, as well as debates around issues like race, class, and monumentality. Penetrating, insightful, and often moving, Lum's writings are essential for understanding his varied practice, which has often been prescient of developments within contemporary art.
Call Number: ebook
Ken Lum by
A major retrospective of one of Canada's most widely recognized contemporary artists. Over the past 25 years, Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum has developed a large body of work that includes painting, sculpture, performance and photography. He has exhibited throughout North America, Europe and Asia, and his awards include a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award. This richly illustrated volume is the first full-length book devoted to Ken Lum's work in more than nine years. In this time, his work has shifted to large permanent public installations, among them his fourth permanent public installation opening in 2010 in the Netherlands. Ken Lum accompanies a large-scale exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery that celebrates Lum's entire career and showcases aspects of his work-such as the mazes created for Documenta 11 and the Istanbul Biennal-that have never been seen before in North America. This book was published in partnership with the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Call Number: SMFA: N6549.L86 A4 2011
Monument Lab by
What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? That was the question posed by the curators, artists, scholars, and students who comprise the Philadelphia-based public art and history studio Monument Lab. And in 2017, along with Mural Arts Philadelphia, they produced and organized a groundbreaking, city-wide exhibition of temporary, site-specific works that engaged directly with the community. The installations, by a cohort of diverse artists considering issues of identity, appeared in iconic public squares and neighborhood parks with research and learning labs and prototype monuments. Monument Lab is a fabulous compendium of the exhibition and a critical reflection of the proceedings, including contributions from interlocutors and collaborators. The exhibition and this handbook were designed to generate new ways of thinking about monuments and public art as well as to find new, critical perspectives to reflect on the monuments we have inherited and to imagine those we have yet to build. Monument Lab energizes acivic dialogue about place and history as forces for a deeper questioning of what it means to be Philadelphian in a time of renewal and continuing struggle. Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry, and the editors. Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson.
Call Number: SMFA: NA9350.P49 M66 2020
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