From 6 November 2025 to 1 February 2026, the exhibition “Stille Post — Cho Ari” in the foyer of the Kunsthaus Hamburg is dedicated to the moving connection between biography, environment and collective memory. The centrepiece is the wall and sound work “Akazi, Barocco, Arirang”, in which Cho Ari links the life of Korean nurse Lee Kye-soon — who came to Hamburg as a guest worker in the 1960s — with the journey of an acacia tree along colonial routes between Europe and East Asia. These two stories tell of uprooting, transformation and intergenerational changes that affect both people and nature. The artist views memory not only as a linguistically tangible human phenomenon, but also as an element that circulates and manifests itself in our environment.
The centrepiece of the work is the Korean folk song “Arirang”, which serves as an acoustic archive of collective emotions and a carrier of han (profound sorrow). Cho Ari combines its baroque variations with ultrasonic sounds from the plant world and the voice of Kang Jun, Lee Kye-soon’s daughter. This creates a space in which human and non-human memories coexist and play with the time and structure of perception. The wall installation consists of perforated fabric printed with photographic negatives and patterns created from the vibrational waves of plant signals and the human voice. The textile acts as a membrane between the visible and the hidden, the present and the absent — and invites visitors to experience memory as a dynamic, networked and trans-specific phenomenon.
