VICKY KIM

The latest in a series of silkscreen wallpaper installation works, Vicky Kim's ‘Mudras’, 2025 - conceived especially for the Lechbinska Gallery - stands as a meditation on the politics of bodies, gesture, and representation. Installed either side of the gallery's rear doors, the work is split in two - each part covered in the same irregular ‘pattern’ of gestural marks, yet printed - by hand - in slightly different shades of brown ink.

If resolutely indecipherable, these marks are open to interpretation; their repetitive splatters, stains, scratches, and smudges pointing towards the drudgery and toil of domestic labour, as well as the space of the body and its residues, while also reminiscent of various art forms (both ‘high’ and ‘low’). The printed medium, placing the viewer in apparent proximity to the body (made architectural), while distanced from the original act of mark-making, gives rise to a play around the presence and absence of the body - its gestures, labours, rituals, and scatologies.

As with Kim's past works, images torn from fashion magazines are placed in dialogue with this backdrop, framed and installed high on the wall, on this occasion in two adjacent groups: on the right, first visible from afar through the gallery, six colour images of women's hands (in repose, holding a cigarette, a microphone, etc.), while on the left, seen only upon entering the rear space, six black and white images of male counterparts (gripping an umbrella, leaning against a wall, punching an outstretched palm). Drawn from multiple sources, Kim's selections, stark binary grouping and sequencing, are revealing of the latent sexism, racism, and violence that inhabit these scenes; her inversion of several images amplifying their sinister, fetishistic undertones.

Thrown into relief by the passing of time, these images, published in the 1990s and 2000s - serve as reminders of manufactured social attitudes and aspirations of the recent past. Re-presented back to us, what now appear perverse caricatures, seem to register as a deferred warning of our current malaise. Likewise the title, laden with irony, since neither the gestures inscribed in the wallpaper, or formed by the hands visible in the frames are mudras, invites us to consider the gestures on display not only in terms of the phantasies they present, but for their symbolism in relation to the moment in which we find ourselves: a gloved hand raised in the process of hailing a taxi or calling to an acquaintance, now a fascist salute.