SMFA Billboard: Ken Lum

A book can also exist as an autonomous and self-sufficient form.

Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books” (1975)

Sitting and waiting, the figure in the billboard embodies moments between periods of labor—an experience that feels all too present in our contemporary existence. I’m Always Waiting is a work within the five-part poster series “Time. And again.” by artist Ken Lum, featuring photographs the artist shot in Antwerp, Belgium aligned with text. The texts focus on how photographed subjects feel about their work as they express anxieties, pressures, and challenges. Within the context of the larger series title conveying repeated time, I’m Always Waiting refers to a state of perpetual precarity in neoliberal work cultures.

Simultaneously, the seated figure could also be relaxing—highlighting the duality, gaps, and tensions embedded in Lum’s image-and-text works. While waiting is a lived reality, especially for artists within gig-work economies, it can also function as a generative space of potentiality.   

Ken Lum’s I’m Always Waiting is part of the Tufts University Art Galleries exhibition Ulises: Assembly, on view August 13–November 10, 2024, examining the labor of bookworkers and bookcarers through the question: “what do you do?” Both Lum and Ulises examine how text and image operate in tandem and in tension through collaborative labor. A book in the new art can be a billboard.

Image: Ken Lum, I’m Always Waiting, 2021. Digital print with wheatpaste, 120 x 192 in.