Ayoung Kim
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere

Screening
17–30 June 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 17 June at 8 PM

“As usual, the Han River is soaked in antidepressants,
antihistamines, antibiotics and anesthetics!!!
It’s 7pm, evening peak time is back!
We’ll take you to the most elegant routes in Seoul!”
“Dancemaster always likes to keep the action to a minimum.
For Dancemaster, optimization is synonymous with elegance.
No matter what path an object travels,
nature always strives to minimize action…
You know that, don’t you?
But this is no longer about nature…”

In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), Korean artist Ayoung Kim presents a speculative vision of Seoul as an endlessly regenerating labyrinth, where urban space, labour, technology and desire become entangled within a continuously unfolding system. At its centre is Ernst Mo – an anagram of “Monster” – a female delivery rider employed by Delivery Dancer, a fictional platform whose workers are governed by Dancemaster, an omnipresent algorithm that orchestrates every movement, route and task.

Set against the luminous backdrop of a nocturnal metropolis, the work draws on the realities of platform labour and the rapid expansion of the gig economy in South Korea, particularly during and after the pandemic. Yet its scope extends far beyond social commentary. The project explores questions of topology, possible worlds, algorithmic control, hypervigilance and the relentless drive towards optimisation of body, time and space. Seoul emerges as a space suspended between techno-orientalism and Asian futurism, at once familiar and speculative.

Guided by Dancemaster’s elegantly rendered navigation lines, the protagonist traverses an infinite sequence of delivery routes. Every destination generates new pathways, creating a maze-like structure that continuously expands and folds back upon itself.

As Ernst Mo moves through the city, she encounters fissures where parallel realities begin to overlap. Through these ruptures appears En Storm – another anagram of “Monster” – a counterpart from an alternative yet seemingly identical world. Their relationship unfolds through moments of confrontation, empathy and affection, revealing forms of connection that challenge the boundaries of space, time and identity. Drawing on possible-world theory, the work imagines reality as one among innumerable worlds, where multiple versions of the self may coexist and where different ways of being and relating remain perpetually unresolved.

THE AUTHOR

Ayoung Kim weaves reality anew through a tapestry of hybrid narratives, integrating geopolitics, mythology, technology, technoprecarity, and speculative temporalities into her work. Kim often depicts nonconformists or technoprecarious entities whose resistance or misalignment leaves behind strange and singular traces as they deviate from prescribed trajectories. Kim’s synthesized narratives result in far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures across various media. Her practice incorporates discourses on optical and post-optical media, performativity, game simulation, and the narrativity of fiction. Her interest in synthesis, hybridization, and the coexistence of heterogeneous time led to an interest in all kinds of intersections, transfers, transpositions, and interchanges of time, space, structure, and syntax.

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