Koryo-saram and its Manifold Afterlives

AAAinA is proud to share an evening of presentations and conversations emerging from the group exhibition, , featuring artists Alisa Berger, Daria Kim, Luiza Pârvu, and Toma Peiu. The exhibition highlights reflections by these artists on their belonging to and relationship with Koryo-saram communities (Корё-сарам, 고려사람). Within the global Korean diaspora, Koryo-saram occupies a distinct position as an identity formed in the aftermath of the forcible deportation of Koreans living in the Russian Far East to Central Asia in the 1930s.

Starting with the history of Koryo-saram, the program frames diaspora as a site of ongoing negotiations, frictions and innovations. With research-based presentations, field notes, and artist talks, the evening will reflect on how legacies of forced migration unfold across space and time, challenging the issue of continuity. These ideas are explored not as static or linear trajectories, but as kinetic conditions that continually reshape one’s relation to self and collective belonging. Following presentations by writer and curator Sophia Park and artists Alisa Berger, Daria Kim, and Toma Peiu, the artists will join for a conversation moderated by Park.

To time, to distance is co-curated by Tamara Khasanova and Junho Peter Yoon and will be on view at AHL Foundation from March 26 - April 25, 2026. For more information and viewing hours, please visit ahlfoundation.org.

Bios:

Alisa Berger was born in 1987 in Makhachkala, Republic of Dagestan, and raised in Lviv, Ukraine and later Essen, Germany. She studied at KHM Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. She was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and the Deutsche Filmakademie FIRST STEPS Award. In 2023 she received the Studio Collector Prize at Jeu de Paume. Her work has been shown at institutions such as Eye Filmmuseum, Jeu de Paume, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Centre-Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and Kindl Berlin, as well as at film festivals including Berlinale, IDFA, CPH:DOX, and Hot Docs, among others. From 2018 to 2022, she lived in Tokyo and studied Butoh performance.

Daria Kim is a multidisciplinary artist born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, living and working in Berlin. Her practice spans performance, sculpture, video, installation, sound, painting, and drawing, and is grounded in material experimentation, embodied memory, and diasporic histories. Trained initially in painting, she continues to work with charcoal and watercolour, while in sculpture she develops unconventional, concept-driven materials and processes. Daria has exhibited internationally, including at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, documenta fifteen as part of the DAVRA collective, and the Bukhara Biennial. She is currently completing her MFA at Berlin University of the Arts.

Tamara Khasanova is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, originally from Ukraine and Uzbekistan. She was a 2024–25 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) and holds an MA degree in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts. Her research and curatorial work center emergent aesthetics, pedagogical and discursive practices, and forms of collective knowledge production, oriented toward questions of language, ecology, nuclear legacies, and colonial histories. She has curated exhibitions, organized screenings, lectured, and contributed to projects across cultural, publishing, and educational institutions including e-flux, Protocinema, Davra Curatorial Lab, White Columns, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The Clark Art Institute, the Queens Museum, and TransitoryWhite, among others. She currently serves as Studio Director and Curatorial Fellow at École du Soir convened by Christian Nyampeta.

Sophia Park is a writer and curator living in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Seoul, South Korea. Recently, she worked as a curator for the 15th Gwangju Biennale. She has participated in curatorial projects and programs with AHL Foundation (NYC, U.S.), Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht, Netherlands), GYOPO (Los Angeles, U.S.), 2022 Singapore Biennale (Singapore), Asian American Arts Alliance (NYC, U.S.), and others. Her writing can be found in publications such as Monument Lab’s Bulletin, The Amp, Asymptote Journal, Womanly Mag, Inciter Art, and others. She is part of the curatorial collaboration slow cook with Caroline Taylor Shehan and takes care of gummi reading, a mobile reading and study space. She holds a B.A. in Neuroscience from Oberlin College and an M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts.

Luiza Pârvu and Toma Peiu produce film, installation and scholarship. Their work looks at memory, migrant imaginaries, post-socialist transformation and environmental precarity, centering livelihoods on the fringes of society, and seeking to trace present-day reverberations of histories from the past. Their work has been presented in venues worldwide, including film festivals, galleries, classrooms, and community centers. Pârvu and Peiu have produced several installations informed by ethnographic research and documentary work in Central Asia or Eurasian diasporas in the US, including Caution: Once Upon a Time, a River / Once Upon a Time, a Sea (2025), 7 Scenes from a Neighborhood Cafe (2018), Migrant Water (2018) and The Sea Was Here (2019); and are currently in post-production with their feature documentary film How Come We Ended Up Here?, a 16mm poetic journey across post-pandemic New York City, led by an oral history of the Korean Central Asian diaspora. They make work through the Bucharest-based production company Root Films.

Junho Peter Yoon is a doctoral candidate in East Asian Studies at New York University and the Assistant Director of the Center for Korean Research and the Unson Microcollege Program at Columbia University. He received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. His research spans critical theory, cultural studies, ethics, and ecological thought, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary Korean literature, film, and history. His dissertation, Toward Planetary Ethics, explores the ethical and political impasses of the Anthropocene through a close engagement with Korean cultural texts. He has worked with journals and institutions such as e-flux Journal, Screening Room, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and the New York Asian Film Festival. He is currently co-editing two special issues on global Asian photography and the archive, and posthuman visuality in contemporary South Korean art and media.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Photo credits, clockwise: Junho Peter Yoon, Sophia Park (Credit: Chris Voss), Tamara Khasanova, Alisa Berger (Credit: Neven Allgeier), Luiza Pârvu and Toma Peiu, Daria Kim (Credit: Iliya Braun)

The event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations and individuals.

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