KIM HOPSON, PERFORMANCE ART

LITTLE CARIBBEAN ⋆｡°✩ HOUSTON

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all debut footage | 5.09.2026

Sideshow Mama | An Ongoing Video Project by Kim Hopson

Kim Hopson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Houston, TX & Brooklyn, NY. She explores themes of disability, identity and ableism. Experiencing life with a limb difference has given her a unique viewpoint that is reflected in her work. She focuses on the body’s relationship to the world, both physically and emotionally. Motherhood has made that difference a more central part of her art, and her work has expanded to examine those experiences in the context of parenthood. Her intention is to create dialogue around these topics in order to spark a larger conversation.

Sideshow Mama is an ongoing video and performance project by Houston/ NYC based artist Kim Hopson, rooted in her experience as a disabled parent and built outward from there. Working with green screen and video compositing, Hopson constructs layered visual tableaux in which ordinary acts of caregiving: warming a bottle, soothing, adjusting a medical support-  are slowed, repeated, and elevated into deliberate ritual gestures. The props are specific and chosen: milk bottles, doll-babies, textiles, pumping equipment. Nothing is incidental. The work deliberately uses the visual language of historical sideshow imagery, invoking how caregivers (especially disabled bodies) are perpetually on display, scrutinized and spectacular, while the actual depth of their labor remains unseen. That tension is the project's engine. Though the work begins in Hopson's own body and history, its scope is collective by design. She gathers stories from caregivers across the community - disabled and non-disabled alike - and translates those experiences into the ceremonial visual environments she builds for the camera. Caregiving is both intimate and nearly universal, and Sideshow Mama holds both truths at once: the particular weight of one woman's hands, and the broader, largely unacknowledged labor that caregiving has always been.

All the best,

Kim