“Let’s Listen with Our Eyes ...” The Deconstruction of Deafness in Christine Sun Kim’s Sound Art

The academic discipline of Disability Studies investigates the cultural discourses and meanings around disability. Therefore, disability was introduced as a social category based on bodily variations but also as an identity issue. Since 2000, the so called ‘armative model of disability’ has started to gain momentum by drawing upon the spirit of the Disability Arts Movement and Disability Pride. It suggests that impairments are core parts of a person’s being and of their experience. This model challenges the underlying assumption that impairments are personal tragedies. It oers “essentially a non-tragic view of disability and impairment which encompasses positive social identities, both individual and collective, for disabled people grounded in the benefits of lifestyle and life experience of being impaired and disabled” (Swain and French 2000, p. 569). Such a perspective on disability is of course also represented in many contemporary artistic disciplines. Inmyarticle I will focus on selected works by the New York- and Berlin-based Sound Artist Christine Sun Kim. Using her own sonic experience, which is influenced by her deafness, Kim provokes the audience to question a one-dimensional mode of (auditory) perception by directing the attention on the visual, haptic, or conceptional perception of sound. Thus, Kim reveals deafness as a culturally defined impairment/disability: through her artistic practice Kim shifts her identity from non-hearing to dierently hearing, not as a rejection of her deafness, but as an expression of her unique relationship to sound. Therefore, she deconstructs disability by exposing deafness as a positive identity category, which triggers and causes certain abilities.