Installation and performance view of Kinmakers: Hidden Songs in Our Mother’s Dreams at the Crow Museum of Asian Art at The University of Texas at Dallas, 2024.

Photo: © Turk Studio. 

The artist duo Laura Hyunjhee Kim, an assistant professor of visual and performing arts at The University of Texas at Dallas, and Surabhi Saraf, a multimedia artist based in New York, were commissioned to create a new installation for Crow’s multimedia gallery, Kinmakers: Hidden Songs in Our Mother’s Dreams. They work together to explore their diasporic experiences as daughters of Korean and Indian descent, intertwining personal narratives with their ancestral roots and cultural sensibilities.

Kinmakers marks a new chapter in the collaboration between Kim and Saraf. Driven by a shared desire to integrate art into the fabrics of life, they seek to widen the circle of kinship and care through collective thinking-through-making.

Kinmakers is a polyphonic exploration of spiritual and world-building rituals, grounded in the concept of Quantum Listening—a practice musician and composer Pauline Oliveros described as “listening to more than one reality simultaneously.” “Hidden Songs in Our Mother’s Dreams” is the opening chapter of the Kinmakers project. Visitors are invited to engage in deep relaxation and whole-body listening under a starry night sky, to melt into the tenderness of the floating pods, and to ponder, “What is it like to be you?”

Central to this quest is an amorphous, shape-shifting blob—a long-term fascination for artists and friends Kim and Saraf. Porous and fluid, the blob transforms into a womb-like sounding vessel that holds intergenerational memory and desire, the unspoken yet felt dreams of our mothers, our mothers’ mothers, and beyond.

On view on the UT Dallas campus.