Ayoung Kim – Many Worlds Over

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin

Exhibition documentation, 2025

This series documented Ayoung Kim’s first solo exhibition in a German museum at Hamburger Bahnhof, following her “Delivery Dancer” universe across video projections, game-like environments and sculptural elements. The commission focused on installation views that trace how her speculative, AI-driven narratives about time, reality and queerness spill out of virtual space into the physical galleries, transforming the topology of the museum into a layered, futuristic Seoul.

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Exhibition text by Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

Ayoung Kim’s (b. 1979 in Seoul, Korea) first solo exhibition in a German museum spans the most recent years of her artistic practice and explores concepts of time, reality, belonging, and queerness. Using Artificial Intelligence, video, game simulations, and sculpture, Ayoung Kim creates expansive fictional universes governed by their own temporal and spatial laws. Her works are linked by speculative narratives rooted in reality, and viewers become both spectators and first-person players, shaping the story from their perspective.

For her exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Kim draws from a cycle of works that follows a female delivery driver and her identical double in a fictional, futuristic Seoul. In her "Delivery Dancer" universe, infinite possible worlds collide, where time is cyclical and non-linear. Her subjects cross the boundaries of possible realities, creating intersections between times and spaces. Ayoung Kim’s exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof does not only enable its audiences to be immersed in Kim’s virtual landscapes, but extends those into the physical museum space, completely transforming the gallery’s topology.

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