Cho Ari

Cho Ari is a Hamburg based artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the material and emotional connections between human and nonhuman worlds. Through moving image, installation and writing, she examines how power relations and forms of care mutually constitute one another and reveals the affective and political dimensions of these entanglements.

At the centre of Cho Ari’s first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hamburg is a docu-fictional essay film in which the artist engages with two biographies that are, in part, intertwined: that of the Korean nurse Lee Kye-soon, who migrated to Hamburg in the 1960s under the labour recruitment agreement between South Korea and West Germany, and that of the false acacia, a plant whose global spread is closely linked to colonial trade and the transfer of knowledge. Both embody cross-generational processes of uprooting and transformation, set in motion by distinct historical and ecological circumstances. The artist traces these routes combining visual inquiry with an exploration of the complex interrelations from which their stories emerge. Drawing on the concept of eco-memory, remembering is revealed not as an exclusively human phenomenon that can be captured through language, but as something inscribed in smells, sounds, material surfaces and living environments.

Curated by Jaana Heine