As an art historian, I approach the curatorial project as the production – and the maintenance – of a space, both material and discursive, for works of art to resonate. Emphasis, for me, is upon the pedagogical: what are the conditions of a work, its form, its material, its infrastructural and institutional needs, its relationship to collective modes of making and living, as well as what are its effects and affects. Walter Benjamin had described how the past has a claim upon us, and how that claim cannot be settled cheaply. And for me, the pedagogical project is in part to work through the cost of that claim.

Soyoung Yoon is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College, The New School; as Program Director of Visual Studies, she oversees the Skybridge Art and Sound Space as well as curricular development (ex. LVIS 3250 Practicing Curating). She is also a Faculty at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program [ISP]. In 2015~6, she will be a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Pembroke Center at Brown University. Yoon received her Ph.D. in Modern & Contemporary Art and Film & Media Studies from Stanford University, and holds a B.A. from Seoul National University. She was also a Critical Studies participant at the Whitney ISP in 2006~7. Yoon has published in Grey Room, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, Shifters, among other journals and books. Yoon is at work on two book projects around the re-definition of the status of the “document” in the post-war period: Walkie Talkie, a project on the advent of cinéma vérité, amidst the struggles for decolonization and the rise of new technologies of policing; and Miss Vietnam: The Work of Art in the Age of Techno-war, a project on feminist mediation, which reframes technological reproducibility via the framework of reproductive labor, focusing on the shift from photography to video.

Selected Projects