Imaginary Maps: Feminist Art Beyond the Center

The act of closely examining a photograph to extract factual insights, commonly referred to as "reading" in photography discourse, constitutes an epistemological practice. This lecture explores the practice of reading the subjects depicted in Berlin Portraits (2017-18), a photo-portrait series by Korean photographer Oksun Kim. Rather than reading the photographs to identify the diaspora and artistic lineage, I propose to explore Kim's work though discourses of diasporic aesthetics-"surface reading" and "inscrutability." The lecture advocates approaching the subjects of the portraits-diasporic Korean nurses in Berlin-through a method of surface reading, intentionally avoiding a "symptomatic reading" that might inadvertently reduce their lives to a nationalist trope of gendered sacrifice for South Korea's advancement in the present day.