At the core of artist and filmmaker Mooni Perry‘s solo show is the video installation EL (2025), which will be presented in Europe for the first time. Influenced by feminist and speculative readings of East Asian cosmologies, the exhibition takes the form of a hotel lingering between memory and oblivion. Perry takes as her starting point the historical and cultural interconnections of East Asia in the context of Japanese colonial rule in Korea and Manchukuo, a puppet state in northeastern China controlled by Japan from 1932 to 1945. The region was promoted as a space of new possibilities, driven by migration and promises of a better future. This vision, however, was based on coercion, displacement, and human trafficking, as evidenced by the history of the so-called “comfort women,” who were subjected to wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese military.
At Kunst Raum Mitte, the focus on site-specific historiographies shifts to the institutional framework itself: the historic building—originally constructed as part of a school complex during the German Empire, used as an after-school care center in the GDR, and taken over by municipal cultural programs after reunification—can be read as a layered site that embodies diverse historical and political contexts. Here, Perry’s work creates a fictional in-between world in which questions of tradition and Korean identity are explored through video, music, and collective research. In dialogue with Perry’s atmospheric storytelling practice, a curated selection of archival materials from the galerie weisser elefant is on view. Seemingly incidental objects appear in new constellations, bringing into focus moments of staging, hosting, and traveling.
The exhibition is part of the second sequence of the DISSOLUTIONS program, which explores processes of dissolving and reformulating narratives. The sequence includes a series of events. More information on Sequence II can be found here.
Curator of the exhibition: Agnieszka Roguski
Assistant Curator: Annika Reketat
