Künstlerische Leitung M.1 2027/28
Curator Keumhwa Kim will assume the role of artistic director of M.1 in Hohenlockstedt for 1.5 years, starting in January 2027.
Keumhwa Kim has developed a concept for M.1 that focuses on the region’s waterways. Under the working title (In)Visible Tides, a three-part exhibition project will unfold in which water is viewed through artistic works not only as a connective element, but as an ambivalent archive that conceals and reveals, sustains and destroys.
The program is guided by three central research questions: How do processes that evade immediate perception – such as subterranean water pathways, sedimented memories and hydrological regulation – shape landscapes as geological, affective and political forces? How can landscape shift from a passive backdrop to an active method of artistic and curatorial research? And how can embodied knowledge and collaborative practices reshape our understanding of the material and ecological entanglements between human and more-than-human life under uneven conditions of habitability?
Research residencies, public fieldwork and performative formats will culminate in a central group exhibition next summer at M.1 in Hohenlockstedt.
Last year, Kim, as co-artistic director of the Sea Art Festival 2025 (organized by the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee), explored maritime transition zones. In Hohenlockstedt, she will draw on her experience from her artistic engagement with Korea’s tidal landscapes to inform her curatorial work in northern Germany.
Keumhwa Kim was born in South Korea and has lived in Berlin since 2003. As a curator, she works in Berlin, Seoul, and Busan, developing interdisciplinary and collaborative formats at the intersection of art, science, and society. She is currently a Curatorial Fellow at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.
Kim’s curatorial focus is primarily on landscapes, ecologies, and their processes of transformation and within this, particularly on liminality as a state that opens up new spaces for action. Within human systems of perception and land use, liminal landscapes – coastal and tidal zones, as well as getbol (Korean tidal flats) and wetlands – are frequently marginalized or regarded as unproductive within human systems of perception and land use, while at the same time providing fragile refuges for more-than-human life. Precisely because of their vulnerability, these landscapes function as ecological early-warning systems and archives of knowledge, through which both present crises and future conditions of coexistence can be examined.
Kim studied art history, museology, and German language and literature in Seoul and Berlin and earned a Master of Arts in Art Science and Art Technology from the Technical University of Berlin. Her most recent projects include the intervention Nägel by Sonya Schönberger at St. Matthäus Church in Berlin (2025) and the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors (2022–2024). She curated Kimsooja – (Un)folding Bottari at the Humboldt Forum (2023) and developed the art-science project Moss with ZER01NE / Hyundai Motor Group (2022); since 2019, she has been overseeing the long-term garden project Das Dritte Land in Berlin and Erfurt.