In her quest for the origins of the self, Suah Im draws upon diverse cultural backgrounds, traditional mythology, and the principles of Daoism to contemplate and reconstruct contemporary notions of identity, which often feel fragmented and underdeveloped. Employing multimedia strategies, Im engages in this introspective process.

 

Im presents an installation comprising drawings, videos and sculptures. Inspired by the Korean legend of Imugi, a colossal snake that aspires to become a dragon, Im devolps a narrative that intertwines the image of snake, dragon and herself. The installation, characterized by delicate, fragile structure in the sculptures and subtle tension in the textile materiality, underlines the bodily limitations while playfully alluding to the desire for liberation and metamorphosis.

​

​

Unschuldiges Ungeheuer
(eng. Innocent Monster)

 

Curated by Keumhwa Kim

​

​

The exhibition brings together three female artists of the post-migrant generation whose artistic practice explores the cultural appropriation of symbols, icons and stereotypes. Their focus is on the material cultures, mythologies and marginalised minorities often neglected by Eurocentric perspectives. The everyday lives of migrants in a post-colonial context, their views and counter-views of the 'other', the 'foreign' and the 'unknown' are expressed in a variety of ways in their installations, drawings and video works. From the painted nails of a migrant worker, to a snake growing out of a finger, or a hybrid creature that transforms into a dragon, to soft claws and the wings of the unknown, the works of the three artists enfolds an unusual chain of associations. Using fragments of symbols and stereotypes, they question our conventional notions of the unknown, the different and the monstrous, and explore the ambivalence and symbiotic nature of our existence.

 

In their installations and drawings, artists Wie-yi T. Law and Suah Im explore the mythology of the dragon and its cultural appropriation in Asia and Europe. The dragon, which in the Christian pictorial tradition embodies evil, the sinister and the demonic, is often regarded as sacred in Asia. These different perceptions of the mythical creature and its fluid transformations from the Middle Ages to pop culture serve as a source of inspiration for the two artists to explore questions of cultural hybridity and their own identity. In a humorous and playful way, the two artists reveal the flip side of Eurocentric notions of the monster and its innocent side. Jinran Ha presents a video installation created in collaboration with Kook-Nam Cho-Ruwwe, Suza Husse (NAILShacksfacts*fictions) and the Korean Women's Group in Germany. Her video work deals with the process of symbiogenesis of different organisms into a new whole, showing how a foreign body in a microbiological cell gently merges with other cells and this unknown manifests itself as a group of Korean guest workers. The grateful foreign bodies of German society mutate into a collective of monstrous power.

Yes! The monster is innocent - (Das Ungeheuer ist unschuldig)