Resident artist for CERN/FACT collab announced
South Korean artist Yunchul Kim has been declared the winner of the COLLIDE International Award, a collaboration between CERN and Liverpool media arts centre FACT.
The Berlin-based artist's proposal beat a record 904 entries from 71 countries.
Now in its fifth year, COLLIDE is a major arts and science residency programme, which sees CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) collaborate with different international cultural organisations.
This year’s partnership with FACT gives the artist the opportunity to undertake a two-month residency at CERN, Geneva – spending time with a community of 14,000 scientists at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider – and one month at FACT.
Kim’s work explores the artistic potential of fluid dynamics (the science of liquids and gases in motion). His winning project proposal, Cascade, will ‘look at the possibility of controlling the propagation of light through colloidal suspensions of photonic crystals’ – which roughly simplifies to ‘spreading light through crystals suspended in liquid’.
(Take a look at some of Kim’s work in the video below.)
Kim was chosen as the winner by a jury including Mike Stubbs, artistic director of FACT; Monica Bello, head of Arts@CERN, and University of Liverpool physicist Tara Shears.
“As scientists, we’re exploring what the world is made of,” said Shears at the announcement event on Wednesday. “Art is an exploration of the world around us too. It can open you up to exactly the same idea from a completely different direction.”
“The sculptural nature of Yunchul Kim’s work creates uncanny experiences, which at times seem beyond belief, and challenge our understanding of the world as both analytic and embodied,” the jury commented.
“[He] has an outstanding ability to explore the gap between the experiential and conceptual, and we are thrilled to see how he will embed these ideas in his residency at CERN and FACT.”
Honorable mentions went to Mexican conceptual artist Julieta Aranda and Athens-based British artist James Bride.