Ayoung Kim's 'Many Worlds Over' exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof explores technoprecarity through digital installations

Ayoung Kim's first European solo exhibition 'Many Worlds Over' at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum transformed the space into a labyrinth exploring algorithmic control. The exhibition featured works like Ghost Dancers B (2022) showing life-sized delivery riders frozen mid-grapple amid shattered glass, and Ghost Dancers A (2022) with disembodied helmets trailing cables like severed spines. Kim's speculative universe examines what she calls 'technoprecarity,' where platform metrics colonize human consciousness. Her protagonists Ernst Mo and En Storm navigate algorithmic mazes in her work, with human feelings becoming 'unhygienic'—the artist's term for emotions resisting optimization logic. The manga-style wallpaper Evening Peak Time Is Back (2022) depicted riders embracing with subtly erotic overtones against dystopian blue walls. Kim recently won the LG Guggenheim Award in February 2025. Her work uses game engines and AI-generated sequences to create glitches in capitalism's fever dream, where multiple temporalities coexist and love entwines with antagonism. Footage of high-speed delivery routes streamed endlessly in the helmet visors of her installations.