Detail of a photo from the personal archive of Kang Jun, daughter of Lee Kae-sun
Whisper Down the Lane –
Cho Ari
6 November 2025 – 1 February 2026
Kunsthaus foyer
Starting from the concept of eco-memory, Cho Ari‘s wall and sound installation Akazi, Barocco, Arirang approaches two interwoven biographies: that of Korean nurse Lee Kye-soon, who migrated to Hamburg in the 1960s as a so-called guest worker, and that of the acacia tree, a species that spread along colonial routes between Europe and Asia. Both embody transgenerational trajectories of uprooting and transformation. Through these intertwined stories, the artist embarks on a sensual search for traces, in which memory appears not only as a human and linguistic phenomenon, but as something that circulates through our environment.
At the center of the work lies the Korean folk song Arirang. It serves as an acoustic archive of collective emotions and as a carrier of han (deep sorrow). Cho Ari weaves Arirang with baroque variation, ultrasonic sounds captured from the plant world, and the voice of Kang Jun, Lee Kye-soon’s daughter, creating a shift within which human and non-human memories coexist. While the sound vibrates through the temporal and structural dissolution of memory, the wall installation appears as the surface where its residue briefly settles into matter. Its perforated plane is printed with photographic negatives and is patterned after the oscillation waves that arise from the interference between plant signals and the human voice. It acts as a permeable membrane at the threshold between the visible and the hidden, the present and the absent. In that way, the artist creates an auditory and material liminal space, in which memory becomes perceptible as a dynamic, interspecies network.
In the experimental and communicative exhibition format Whisper Down the Lane, the roles and functions of hosting and being hosted become fluid: in line with the eponymous children’s game, the exhibiting artists themselves choose the next person. With the project, the Kunsthaus transfers part of the curatorial responsibility to the artists themselves, with the aim of creating alternative institutional modes of access and rendering local network structures visible both in terms of personal ties and with regard to artistic approaches. So far, works by Jaewon Kim, Fritz Lehmann, Altay Tuz, Pia Pospischil, Luzia Cruz and Laurel Chokoago have been shown as part of Whisper Down the Lane.
In her interdisciplinary artistic practice, Cho Ari (*1992) explores the porous boundaries where embodiment, materiality, and interspecies agency intersect within ever-shifting ecological and perceptual environments. In 2025, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work has been exhibited at SENDER, Hamburg (2025); Satellit, Hamburg (2025), Galerie Flut, Bremen (2024), and her performances and publications have been presented at Galerie Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin (2024); I Never Read, Basel (2025) and La Chambre de Bonne, Paris (2025), among others.
Thursday, 6 November 2025, 6 pm
Opening
in the context of Panorama XVIII with RVDS & GGG