Kimsooja: To Breathe – Mokum

Placed across the centuries-old gravestone floor are round, colourful textile bundles called bottari. They draw on traditional Korean wrapping cloths and are a
recurring motif in Kimsooja’s work. Each bundle is filled with clothing donated by residents from across Amsterdam’s many communities, whose cultural roots span the world. The bottari resonate with Amsterdam’s identity as a city of arrival and departure: one shaped by global influences. Today, the city comprises a majority of minorities, representing more than 170 nationalities.

For To Breathe – Mokum, more than 44,000 panes in the towering windows of the Oude Kerk have been covered with transparent film that refracts sunlight into all the colours of the light spectrum. The film is composed of thousands of vertical and horizontal lines per square centimetre — a woven structure that functions like a prism. The coloured light shifts throughout the day, gliding like a spotlight through the centuries-old interior. Different elements of the building are illuminated in turn — a vaulted ceiling, a gravestone, a pillar — creating a continually changing perspective. Our gaze is guided by the light; the architecture reveals itself anew each time.

In this meditative choreography of colour and space, we rediscover the church in a new form — not as a static monument, but as a living body of light. The rainbow rays also recall the Catholic era, when countless stained-glass windows illuminated the church interior in a myriad of sparkling hues. Kimsooja creates these light interventions around the world — seeing in them a universal language of light, colour, and reflection, a way of symbolically connecting a network of places across the globe.

In the year Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary, Kimsooja’s works embed themselves into the city’s long migration history. Situated in our capital’s old harbour district, the area around the Oude Kerk has, for centuries, been a point of arrival and departure. When Amsterdam flourished into a metropolis in the seventeenth century, the area around the church was already home to various migrant communities. From sailors who dried their sails in church and prayed for safe passage, to migrants who signed their marriage certificates here in the seventeenth century. But also the rise of Chinatown in the twentieth century (which is considered the oldest Chinese neighbourhood on the European mainland): this history is resonantly woven into To Breathe – Mokum. The title of the exhibition refers to the Yiddish word ‘mokum’, which means ‘city’ or ‘safe haven’ – a name that Jewish migrants gave to the city of Amsterdam when they found a home here.

Born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1957, Kimsooja is widely regarded as one of today’s most important artists. Her work is rooted in Korean traditions and encompasses diverse media, including installation, performance, video, and photography, and is exhibited worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, in 2024; Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, in 2024; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2015. She represented South Korea at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and took part in Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007. The FENIX Migration Museum in Rotterdam recently acquired her key work Bottari Truck – Migrateurs (2007–2009).