Love Song

How shall I keep my soul from touching yours?
How shall I lift it out beyond you toward other things?
Ah, I would like to lodge it in the dark with some lost thing in some
silent foreign place that doesn’t tremble when your depths stir.
Yet whatever touches you and me blends us together just as a bow’s stroke
from two strings draws one voice.
Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song.

(Liebeslied, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow)

On Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 July, at 22:20, If I Can’t Dance presents the performance Some Left by Sung Hwan Kim at Ruyschstraat 4-III in Amsterdam, with performers Matthew Infante and Jieun Rim, and with music by David Michael DiGregorio (aka dogr). After a full month of working, Sung Hwan Kim shares his work with the audience in the intimate space of an apartment home. We invite you to join us for a summer evening in which aspects of sensuality and materiality, addressed in the practice of the artist come to be articulated in a performance that is the first of two renditions. The second rendition will be presented in Amsterdam coming November.

If I Can’t Dance invited curator Natasha Ginwala to write down her impressions. The artist wishes to accentuate that this text is an interpretation and not a representation of the work. Download her witness report below.

Sung Hwan Kim is one of five artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance to make a new work as part of Edition IV – Affect (2010-2012). Some Left is co-produced by Tate Modern and is a prelude to Sung Hwan Kim’s presentation there in November 2012.

If I Can’t Dance’s programme is financially supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, the Culture Programme of the European Union, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.