Iden Sungyoung Kim

In her work, Iden Sungyoung Kim explores the complex political, social and ethical dimensions of nuclear technology and armament. Since 2017, the artist has been developing projects at the intersection of field research, archival work and artistic intervention: archive-based and analog photography, video and spatial installation, lecture performance and experimental documentation.

Her artistic language combines documentary precision with poetic transformations: Landscapes become symbols of geopolitical conflicts, archived material becomes visual essays that interweave memory, trauma and political power relations. The focus is less on technical factuality and more on the aesthetic translation of complex structures into images, installations and atmospheres.The generational contrast is particularly formative for the artist: while she and her contemporaries understand the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily as a symbol of destructive violence and the nuclear threat that is still effective today, her grandmother’s generation remembered it not only as a catastrophe, from the experience of the Japanese occupation, but also as a form of liberation forced by foreign policy. This interweaving of personal memory and global politics lends Iden Sungyoung Kim’s work a special field of tension that inextricably links private and collective historiography.

Iden Sungyoung Kim’s artistic research starts at the intersection of history, politics and technological power. She shows how discourses around nuclear research from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima have not only changed the physical world, but have also shaped symbolic and ideological landscapes. In addition, the artist addresses the current geopolitical tensions in Europe and Asia in the context of nuclear armament – exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the dynamics of a new Cold War, as well as the ongoing debate in Germany about nuclear power, the role of the Bundeswehr in international nuclear strategies and social responsibility in dealing with nuclear energy. The discussion about nuclear weapons in the Baltic states, Finland, Ukraine and North Korea show how unstable international politics is and how deeply rooted the continuities of Cold War ideology are.