Kianga FORD

Profile

Kianga Ford works primarily with sound and environment. Her immersive projects query the relationship between physical and cultural proximity. Her work has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem; USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; and the California Biennial. She is currently Director of BFA Fine Arts and Assistant Professor of New Genres in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York. She lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

About works / performance

My practice is very multi-disciplinary and concept-driven. I work a lot with scored environments--creating spaces for listening and/or for interacting with others that primarily use design-based installation, sound, performance, and site-specific strategies. A lot of my work is concerned with narrative as an immersive experience and with the fictions of everyday living.  Since 2003, a major focus of my work has been on developing the series of narrative walking tours, called "The Story of This Place," that create historically-informed but fictional stories for mapped routes through cities (see www.charmcityremix.com).

I am interested in catching some of what gets lost in the gaps of social science and cultural theory--the ways in which macro-level shifts in social organization and economic paradigms play out at the level of the individual and shape our desires for proximity to and distance from one another. My work explores the ways in which the broadening terrain of popular culture creates challenges for talking about elements of culture along lines of heritage, ethnic, or even national identity.  Key ideas for me are the remix, the dynamics of intimacy, and the socio-political dimensions of space.