Ken Lum

Born 1956, Vancouver, Canada.

Most people in Liverpool are familiar with the pleasant green space of St John’s Gardens. Fewer visitors to the gardens, though, will be aware of the hidden history of the site – a former burial ground which, when it closed in 1854, contained 27,000 bodies, most buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. Ken Lum will reconnect the visible and invisible aspects of the site, constructing a unique pavilion which takes us partly under the surface of the gardens. Lum likes to put viewers of his work into unsettling places and perspectives, and here we are drawn into a half-hidden network of spaces, brought together with other visitors to the work and finding ourselves both viewer and spectacle.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2004 Pi, public art commission, City of Vienna, Austria
Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna, Austria
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Center, Toronto, Canada
Xpo September, Stockholm, Sweden
Schnitzel Company, Museum in Progress/Arbeiterkammer Wien, Vienna, Austria

2003 LA Galerie (Lothar Albrecht), Frankfurt, Germany
Galerie Nelson, Paris, France
Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Canada
Art Gallery of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Galerie Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland

2002 Ken Lum Works with Photography, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, Canada
LA Galerie (Lothar Albrecht), Frankfurt, Germany
Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France
Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna, Austria

2001
Galeria Espacio Electico, Buenos Aires, Argentina
There is No Place Like Home, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
The Agency Contemporary, London, UK
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, USA
Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria
There is No Place Like Home, Museum in Progress, Vienna, Austria
LA Galerie (Lothar Albrecht), Frankfurt, Germany

2000 The Gate Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2005 Arbeitshaus: Einatmen. Ausatmen, Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany
Heal the World: A Tightly Curated Approximation of a Global Lifestyle, The Third Line Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Monuments for the USA, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA
Morir de Amor, Museo Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, Mexico City, Mexico

2004 Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA

2003 Contact Photo: Toronto Festival of Photography, Hal Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Science + Fiction, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany
Away from Home, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, USA
Micropolitics: Everyday Life and Art, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain

Further Reading

Catherine Bedard, Ken Lum, exh. cat., Paris: Centre Culturel Canadien, 2002

Christine Ross, chapter on Ken Lum in The Aesthetics of Disengagement, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Kitty Scott, Ken Lum: Works with Photography, exh. cat., Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2003

John Tupper, Ken Lum: Photo-Mirrors, exh. cat., São Paolo: Bienal de São Paolo, 1998