AMSTERDAM.- Especially for the Oude Kerk, internationally acclaimed South Korean artist Kimsooja has created her largest-ever series of unique Bottari. This new series of bundles, widely used in Korean culture to carry cherished belongings during travel, graces Oude Kerk’s historic floor of gravestones. The Bottari are mare from used clothing and bedcovers collected from Amsterdam’s diverse immigrant communities. The resulting exhibition, Kimsooja: To Breathe – Mokum, celebrates the city’s rich migration history. Kimsooja has also transformed the church’s Gothic windows, covering all 44,000 panes with iridescent film to transform sunlight into a sea of rainbow hues. The exhibition can be experienced from 24 May to 9 November 2025 at the Oude Kerk.


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Bottari: Textile bundles with stories of travel

A recurring motif in Kimsooja’s work, the Bottari symbolise uprooting and coming home, holding on and letting go, travelling and taking root. Along with the processes of wrapping memories of bodies, the artist reflects on existential, cultural and political human experiences. For this exhibition, Kimsooja aims to create bottari that resonates with Amsterdam’s identity as a city of arrival and departure: one shaped by a majority of minorities and home to more than 170 nationalities. Filled with clothing from Amsterdam’s diverse communities, they embody themes of migration, belonging, and identity.

Oude Kerk bathed in a rainbow of light

For Kimsooja: To Breathe – Mokum, more than 44,000 panes in the soaring Gothic windows of the Oude Kerk have been covered with a transparent film that refracts sunlight into every colour of the spectrum. The film consists of thousands of vertical and horizontal lines in every inch, a woven structure that functions like a prism or painting abstracted into light, enveloping the space and the viewers as another architectural Bottari. As the shifting rainbow light moves across the floor, pillars, and woodwork, it not only brings the church’s medieval past to life but also reflects Amsterdam’s radiant character in the city’s oldest building. Light and colour transform To Breathe – Mokum into a meditative experience on space, time, and memory. Kimsooja creates this work in many different venues across the world as a way to connect places around the globe.

750 years of Mokum: a haven and city of migration

In the year Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary, Kimsooja’s works embed themselves into the city's long migration history. Situated in our capital’s old harbour district, the area around the Oude Kerk has, for centuries, been a point of arrival and departure.

When Amsterdam flourished into a metropolis in the seventeenth century, the area around the church was already home to various migrant communities. From sailors who dried their sails in church and prayed for safe passage, to migrants who signed their marriage certificates here. But also the rise of Chinatown in the twentieth century (considered the oldest Chinese neighborhood on the European mainland): this history is resonantly woven into Kimsooja: To Breathe – Mokum. The title of the exhibition refers to the Yiddish word ‘mokum’, which means ‘place’ or ‘safe haven’, a name the city of Amsterdam has held for centuries.

Kimsooja

Currently based in Seoul, Kimsooja (b.1957) is an international conceptual artist whose practice explores the totality of life and art, transcending distinctions of medium and form through works of painting, by sewing, installation, performance, video, light and sound. In the 1980s, she began to experiment with alternative modes of expression while contemplating the two-dimensional structure of painting, leading to a series of sewing works that revealed a dualistic order of vertical and horizontal as the foundation of the world, thus expanding the object of her artistic inquiry from the material to the non-material. Kimsooja’s resolute pursuit of the latter and adoption of “non-doing, non-making” as an aesthetic framework inform her longstanding engagement with various media and methodologies, driving her persistent questioning of art and humanity in conceptual, contemplative aesthetics and humanism.

Her work has been subject of numerous solo exhibitions in major international museums as well as site-specific installations, for example at Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024), Humboldt Forum (2024), Cisternerne/ Frederiksbergmuseerne (2023), Cathédrale Saint-Etienne de Metz (2022), Wanas Konst (2020), Traversées/Kimsooja in Poitiers (2019), Peabody Essex Museum (2019), Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chapel (2019), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2017), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2015), Centre Pompidou Metz (2015), Vancouver Art Gallery (2013), Crystal Palace of Reina Sofia Museum (2006), EMST, Athens (2005), Kunstpalast Dusseldorf (2004), MAC Lyon (2003), PAC Milan (2003), Kunsthalle Wien (2002), Kunsthalle Bern (2001) and MoMA PS1 (2001). She has been part of numerous biennials and triennials like BienalSUR (2021, 2023), Documenta14 (2017), Venice Biennale (2013, 2007, 2005, 2001, 1999), Gwangju Biennale (2012, 2000, 1995), Lyon biennale (2000), Sao Paulo Biennale (1998), Istanbul Biennale (1997), and Manifesta 1 (1996). The Fenix Museum of Migration in Rotterdam recently acquired her key work Bottari Truck – Migrateurs (2007–2009).



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