#149: Sylbee Kim

Friday, 14 March 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

“Sylbee Kim’s video installations articulate the consonance between spirituality and neoliberalism, exploring how technology and capital have displaced mythological figures and deities as paragons of virtue. Through a combination of allegorical imagery, speculative manuscripts and diverse display structures, Kim forges new discursive approaches toward understanding the ways that desire and doctrine hold sway over the human psyche. (…) The terminology, quotations and concepts that Kim fashions into poetic scripts for her video works derive from sources that range from ancient wisdom to contemporary internet forums. Often incantatory in structure and tone, these distilled statements resemble precepts or scriptures recited in religious rituals.”– Andy St. Louis, Future Present: Contemporary Korean Art (Skira, Milano 2024)

Lover Boys, 2009, 8:36 min
The two-channel video consists of YouTube downloads of ‘fancams’ of K-pop idols shot by their fans; shootings of statues of Antinoos––the legendary lover boy of the Roman Emperor Hadrian––and other juvenile figures from ancient European art history. Consisting of quotations from historical texts, poetry by Sappho and Pessoa, and ‘fan fictions’ by boy band fans, a tender, whispering female voice-over confesses a quasi-religious love for the young idols in rhythmical stereo sound.

A Sexagesimal Love Letter and Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe, 2016, 11:39 min
The work aims for a fearless perception of death, to reevaluate life in our age of carefree, post-capitalistic devastation. Around the keywords of war and body, archive material as well as copyright-free images are recomposed or underlaid in the negative space of figures. The Ancient sexagesimal system was a frame to understand the universe, and it is still contained in our measurement of time. Structured by 59 numbers, A Sexagesimal Love Letter is conceived as a kind of digital codex that reminds of public advertisements or Internet memes around the formation of the body as a sociopolitical universe. In Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe, two figures appear immersed in mystic rituals of life and death in an urban environment. They represent all beings in their struggle for life under lethal conditions of wars that sustain plutocracy. On the other hand, a non-staged dialogue exposes the actual moment of reality in interference with the overall narrative structure.

Trinity: Finance–Credo–Spirituality, 2019, 11:22 min
Through investing in cryptocurrencies, borne from the intersection of technology and the financial market, younger generations all over the world anticipated finally becoming richer than their parents’. Yet several crypto crashes as an outcome brought about self-deprecating expressions and memes like “All we can do is just pray”, specifically in South Korea. Kim observes how seemingly unrelated financial capital and religious spirituality strangely connect, driven by the human inclination to credence and the will to believe. The video centers on three orbiting female figures, each wielding an abstract identifier of either financial technology (a neural-network-like harness), credit systems (a spiny smartphone-sized object) or religious faith (a mannequin head). Compounding this ambiguous imagery are selective uses of 3D animation, image overlays and green screen compositing that generate surreal moments of visual tension and resolution.

Vagrant Genes: Itinerary, 2021, 16:30 min
Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work examines human isolation and the spread of infectious diseases in parallel to migratory birds, whose genetic navigation interpret the Earth’s magnetic fields for their seasonal transit. Kim collaborated with Berlin-based choreographer Jung Sun Kim to develop a type of gymnastics for the human body in quarantine. Kim “carries” the choreography from Germany to South Korea and finally “transfers” it to Nacca, a Japanese activist and vegan cook in Busan, who practices it on Eulsukdo Island, a habitat of migratory birds. The work offers an intimate look at the intertwined global networks of viruses and air currents, and the pandemic as an aftermath of anthropocentrism. The full exercise Vagrant Genes: Choreography can be viewed on Kim’s YouTube channel and practiced in one’s own location of isolation. https://rb.gy/qufliq

Unindented Life, 2021, 9:23 min
The work was produced in Gwangju, a South Korean city where the democratic protesters were massacred by the military regime in the 1980s. Without revealing the definitions of the double-marginalised in the historical narrative of Gwangju, the video imagines a time and space where minorities finally arrive to find each other. According to biotechnological studies, the light of change is inherent in every cell emitted when it burns oxygen, regardless of whether this change means approaching death. Five figures representing Light, Wind, Water, Minerals, and (financial) Derivatives hint at the essential state of contemporary capital society. Symbolic and poetic verbal expressions reflect uncertainty, a drifting life, a history of refusal, and a sense of non-belonging within reality, constantly changing through technology, capital, and life sciences. Their singing echoes each other and creates a temporal space that otherwise has never been given to them.

Sylbee Kim (born 1981) is a South Korean video artist based in Berlin since 2005. Kim’s video installations experiment with digital and physical making processes and extend virtual materialities to the real. Her practice questions whether art could bridge differences and simulate a pluralistic sociopolitical ground. Kim held solo exhibitions at Mélange Cologne, Nevan Contempo Prague, and Insa Art Space Seoul, among others. She participated in group exhibitions at Gwangju Biennale, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Mediacity Seoul Biennale, Kunstverein Göttingen, Seoul Museum of Art, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Kim received stipends from Stiftung Kunstfonds Germany, Art Council Korea, and Berlin Senate. Her works are collected by KADIST San Francisco, MMCA Korea, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, and Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Kim was a resident artist at Gasworks London and MeetFactory Prague and was elected as the first Asian board member of bbk berlin. Her upcoming solo exhibition Berlin Blue will open in October 2025 at Art Space Boan, Seoul.