Those without a Share @Kunstraum, Berlin
Indeed the very meaning of ‘home’ changes with the experience of decolonization [and] radicalization. At times, home is nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations.*
–bell hooks (1999: 148). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.
*In keeping with hooks’s own stylistic choice, her name is written in lowercase, signaling a rejection of traditional hierarchies of gender, class, and racial backgrounds. The word locations remains singular in meaning to convey home as a layered, shifting space rather than a fixed point.
Poster of the exhibition ‘Those without a Share’
At the end of May 2025, Asian Voices Europe (AVE) visited Those without a Share, a group exhibition at Kunstraum Berlin curated by artist Yewon Seo. The exhibition begins with the notion of home, not as a fixed destination, but as a layered space shaped by displacement, belonging, borders, and the body. Those without a share brings together eight artists who work in Germany through diverse migration paths, exploring ‘home’ not as a fixed location but as a layered, shifting condition shaped by borders, displacement, and memory.
In the post-pandemic era, while physical borders may have reopened, social boundaries have become more rigid. The atmosphere has changed: for migrants, for others, for outsiders. In this context, the exhibition asks: What does it mean to belong? What remains when home is ever out of reach?
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The space was divided between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, contrasting carceral-like coldness with a soft, imagined garden of warmth. This exhibition does not dream of utopia. Rather, it imagines a heterotopia, a space of coexistence in contradiction. The works trace a cartography of imagined belonging made by those who had to leave or were never invited to stay. In times when migration is increasingly met with symbolic and institutional boundary-drawing, this exhibition emerges as an artistic response. Through painting, mixed media, sculpture, video art, installation, virtual reality, and performance, the artists articulate a plurality of experiences.
Wandering Rooms #3, installation, courtesy of the artist
Hee Seo’s work Wandering Rooms #3 stood out for its quiet but unsettling presence. Composed of a headless black suit, suspended light, and a lone television screen, the installation holds the viewer in a space that feels both staged and in flux. This choreography of objects reflects the artist’s own experience of navigating Germany as both an insider and outsider, as familiar spaces can suddenly feel estranged. The warmth of worn wooden planks shifts to the cold, polished surface of aluminum. The subtle, perhaps unknowing, return of the discomfort once carried under another’s gaze. These momentary, intimate impressions weave together a space that invites the viewer to sense the presence and untold circumstances of a life within it.
The route is off track, so it’s being rediscovered! (2024), video, courtesy of the artist
Curator Yewon Seo’s own contribution, a quiet video and zine, traced stories of Korean FLINTA* (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, Agender) persons born in the 1980s-90s who carry the feeling of not fully belonging, neither here nor there. Her work invited us to embrace the liminality, reflecting on what kind of solidarity can emerge in spaces of in-betweenness.
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Those without a Share reminds us of the power of art to resist, to relocate, and to envision alternatives. We were deeply moved by how the exhibition felt not like a proclamation, but rather a conversation.
Author: Hyunjung
Editor: Chenyue
Photo credit: Yewon Seo & Hee Seo
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Those without a share Exhibition
May 30 - June 3, 2025
Artists: Alungoo Xatan, Daria Kim, Hee Seo, Luań Càja, Terme Alavi, Yewon Seo, Yujin Song, Zifan Jiang
Curated by Yewon Seo | Graphic Design by Taehee Kim
Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße 65–67, Berlin
https://www.stw.berlin/kalender/vernissage-those-without-a-share.html
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Yewon Seo
a filmmaker and visual designer whose work explores migration, gender justice, and intersectional identity. After leaving a career in corporate finance in South Korea, she moved to Germany in 2018 to develop a poetic yet politically engaged visual language. From October 2025, she will pursue her MA in Documentary Directing at Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF.
