What does time feel like to you? In Ayoung Kim: Many Worlds Over at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, time becomes infinite, distorted, and reimagined. Kim builds speculative worlds governed by their own temporal and spatial laws, extending beyond the screen to disrupt the exhibition space. This immersive experience is dedicated to the fictional world of Delivery Dancer.
"And I hope that audiences can be actively lost in the space, in our many worlds and possibilities, and stumble upon themselves, redefine themselves and get fully immersed in the infinite possibilities of themeselves."
From: Sam Bardaouil in conversation with Ayoung Kim
Ayoung Kim: Many Worlds Over spans video installations, game simulations, AI narratives, and sculptures, creating an intertextual exploration of speculative storytelling. At the core of the exhibition is Kim’s fictional app Delivery Dancer, led by an AI called Dancemaster. The app gamifies gig work in a futuristic Seoul, sending delivery workers—called dancers—on algorithmically optimized routes while urging them to maximize performance and speed. This critique of the gig economy mirrors real-world precarities faced by freelancers in urban centers like Seoul and Berlin.
The narrative follows Ernst Mo, a delivery dancer who encounters her double, En Storm, through a portal to another timeline—a glitch in the algorithm. This meeting blurs the boundaries of time and space as Ernst Mo confronts emotional entanglements with her parallel self. Combining real footage with 3D animation, Kim’s work challenges capitalist and patriarchal myths while subverting linear conceptions of time. Through immersive storytelling, the exhibition invites visitors to rethink societal structures and their relationship to identity and temporality.
