Design Indaba 2017

Bo-Won Keum is a graphic designer pursuing her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work often tests parameters of familiar systems, deconstructs and identifies working parts, and analyses how relationships are affected by the elasticity of the containers, literal and metaphysical, that hold them. She is interested in the performance of procedure, the choreography of regulated movement and circulation, and the interruptions that call them all into question.

Through grants from RISD Graduate Studies in 2015 and the Maharam Foundation in 2016, Keum has spent two years investigating various non-profit organisations that receive and respond to letters from prison inmates across the US who ask for books. These "prison book programs" collect and distribute books free of charge in accordance with federal prison mailing restrictions. In 2016, she spent a summer at Books to Prisoners in Seattle, WA, working to produce a publication of letters from inmates who wrote thank you messages to the organisation. The publication, jointly produced with the organisation, allows these voices, otherwise muffled behind the walls of the US prison system, to be recognised and heard with dignity.