August 10, 2023 | Myung-Sun Kim

The annual Ontario Culture Days’ Creatives in Residence series invites artists to develop community-engaged projects to be presented during the fall Festival. This year’s lineup of residents explore themes of material culture. 

Myung-Sun Kim is an artist and a recognized curator. During the Festival, Kim will present “Rituals for Belonging” through an exhibition at the Toronto Public Library and will host a exhibition tour and ritual sharing where attendees can engage with Kim and discuss the project’s themes and ideas.

Rituals for Belonging is an ongoing series of artist multiples, accompanied by collaborative rituals from various invited contributors. Rituals with the artist multiples function as a container for time and space to hold conversations and connections. They explore the malleability and non-linear evolution of belonging to our lineages (both familial and non-familial), cultural inheritance, diaspora, and the relationship between our body and memory.

These rituals offer possible cultural inheritances to put forward into the future, carrying our ways of expressing and embodying compassion for each other. The rituals include a meditation, a recipe, a score (non/sonic), affirmations, a call to action, and other forms of instructions to elicit the act of belonging or the possibility for remediation of the body, the mind, and the healing of all our relations. These rituals become scores for each visitor, which they can reinterpret and respond to as a performance.

During Rituals for Belonging’s first iteration in 2021, at the Art Gallery of Burlington, I created a series of vessels to gift to each of the ritual contributors as a horizontal heirloom, and for them to offer a ritual using the ceramic vessel.

For this project’s third iteration as part of the Creatives in Residence program for Ontario Culture Days, the rituals and artist multiples focus on joy, pleasure, and sustenance. Ritual contributors are: Lillian Allen, Justine Chambers, Jody Chan, Joni Cheung, Erika DeFreitas, Sameer Farooq, Ness Lee, Simone Schmidt, and Jill Thorp-Shepherd.

I am creating sketches and a series of objects in response to each of the rituals offered. An installation of the drawings, take-away ritual cards, and a series of objects accompanying the rituals will be exhibited at the Toronto Public Library’s Lillian H. Smith branch during the Ontario Culture Days Festival in September and October 2023.

Ontario Culture Days runs an annual Creatives in Residence program. Part of the work of the Creatives is presented during public events for our festival of free arts and culture programming across Ontario.

Find more information on Myung-Sun Kim’s project here, and read more about the 2023 Creatives in Residence cohort here.