MIF21: Captioning the City

What do we notice when we walk through a city? And what does it trigger within us – memories, emotions, sensations?

Christine Sun Kim has installed captions in Manchester (including here on Oxford Road Corridor) – not on TVs and monitors but on streets and buildings, vast physical captions you can seek out on purpose or discover by chance. Some are descriptive, depicting the world that surrounds us. But others are more poetic, asking: what do we perceive and understand about where we are? Playful, powerful and political, Captioning the City invites us to consider what makes up the essence of a city – and to experience our world in a whole new dimension.

Christine Sun Kim is a US-born, Berlin-based artist whose work considers how sound operates in society. Her practice uses everything from written text and musical notation to American Sign Language to explore her relationship to sound, verbal language and the wider environment.