To time, to distance

To time, to distance is co-curated by Tamara Khasanova and Junho Peter Yoon, recipients of the 2025 AHL–Andrew & Barbara Choi Family Foundation Project Grant. The group exhibition features Alisa Berger, Daria Kim, Luiza Pârvu and Toma Peiu.

The opening public reception will take place on Thursday, March 26 from 5:00-8:00 p.m.

In To time, to distance four artists reflect on their belonging to and relationship with Koryo-saram communities (Корё-сарам, 고려사람) . Within the global Korean diaspora, Koryo-saram occupies a distinct position as an identity formed in the aftermath of the forcible deportation of Koreans living in the Russian Far East to Central Asia in 1937. Following the displacement, Koryo-saram built lives across Central Asia, primarily in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, developing idiosyncratic cultural practices within their diasporic contexts. Today, some half-million Koreans who identify themselves as Koryo Saram (saram meaning “person” in Korean) live across countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and beyond, including South Korea and the United States.

The featured works straddle the personal and the historical in their own ways, opening up the exhibition to enduring conversations around the forced displacement of ethnic Koreans in the early twentieth century and how its aftermath continues to shape the narratives of the Korean diaspora. If the self is inextricable from history, then it seems to dwell in the interface between the two that in turn sustains the twin questions of identity and belonging. For Berger and Kim, this tension is manifest in their concern with their Koryo-saram heritage—what is passed down or what persists from the past into their present, even if (or only) in mutated form. The filmmaker duo Pârvu and Peiu extend this further by tracing the dissemination of the Koryo-saram communities following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and early 2000s. Together, their practices attend to the inborn paradox of carrying the weight of history and the attempt to break free from it.

The exhibition then is as much an address to a chapter in the history of displacement as it is an attempt to reckon with the pieces of its afterlives. Irreducible as they may be to one another, these fragments cast from particular angles of reflection are held by questions that continue to haunt us and must be posed each time anew. How do we cut across boundaries and borderlines of our fractured histories that have often been treated in isolation? What other senses of community are possible in the wake of recurrent dispossessions? And how do we insist on carving out spaces for political and aesthetic strategies that help us resist capture by ideological narratives? By placing these artists together in the context of the United States, To time, to distance responds to what is at once a need and a desire: a certain sensibility born out of existing in the interstices that can be reconciled neither to the conditions of an unstable present nor to an equally inscrutable future.

Support: This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the AHL–Andrew & Barbara Choi Family Foundation Project Grant, with additional support from the Jenni Crain Foundation and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Further support was provided, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, and by the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) Arts Fund. Programs of the AHL Foundation are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Special thanks: Vero Sookyung Chai, Muheb Esmat, Amal Issa, Claire Kim, Sook Nyu Lee Kim, Jiyoung Lee, Sophia Park, Caroline Taylor Shehan, Alexander Si, and 82A.

Image: Daria Kim, 006 from the Three Hundred Days series,2025–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.