'Transmigration in Artistic Practice' by kate hers (Screening and Presentation)

'Transmigration in Artistic Practice' is a screening and artist presentation of two projects by the Korean-American artist kate hers, whose works in performance, video and other media deal with issues of language and identity.
MISSING is a performative autobiographical documentary video. In her late 20s, the artist, adopted as an infant and raised in the United States, returned to South Korea in an attempt to find her birth parents. The video documents performances, interventions and text from her adoption documents as well as her appearance on a South Korean television program while on the quest for her birth parents. It investigates the phenomena of Korean adoptees returning to the land of their birth and addresses the issues of belonging and transnational identity.
The work 'Das deutschsprachliche Projekt' consists of two parts and deals with learning a new language and living in a foreign country. In the first part, made in 2008, the artist realized a rather extreme durational performance where she stopped speaking her native language for three months and spoke only in German, a language she was not yet fluent in at the time. The second part of the project is an ongoing one year interactive performance which she publishes on her blog (germanproject.estherka.com). It is made up of short videos in which she introduces online spectators to a new word (swear words, slang, idioms) in German on a daily basis. The project, which can also be described an educational series of video podcasts, tries to explore the notion of cultural identity through language.
kate hers has an Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of California, Irvine and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA). She currently lives in Berlin.