1 Mar - 31 Jul 2026

Ji Yun Kim ( South Korea )

TheMigrant Tongue, The Land That Feeds begins with oral accounts of fermented foodways from Iksan in North Jeolla Province, passed down to Ji Yun Kim by her father. Sustained by fertile plains, Iksan is a place where traditions of preservation and fermentation have long taken root. During the Japanese colonial period, rail networks were developed to facilitate the extraction of grain, as part of colonial modernisation.

Using these oral histories as an axis, the project examines how food, particularly fermentation, has functioned as a cultural language that bears shifts in memory, labour, and migration, continually reconfiguring communal identity and relations.

For Ji Yun, the remembered tastes of Iksan, a place she has never lived in, operate as a transmitted axis. The project asks how Korean life in Germany, from the first generation of labour migrants such as miners and nurses, to their descendants, and to more recent arrivals, holds distinct axes that resonate with one another.

Further, just as fermentation is realised through interactions between humans and microbes, the project reveals how Korean cuisine has long sustained modes of coexistence forged through migration and encounter from a nonhuman perspective, and rethinks the ethics of hospitality and resilience latent within these practices.