In Ayoung Kim’s speculative universe, delivery riders navigate algorithmic mazes, their bodies split and multiplied through game engines and AI-generated sequences like glitches in capitalism’s fever dream. Her protagonists—Ernst Mo and En Storm—embody what Kim calls “technoprecarity,” where platform metrics colonize human consciousness. In Kim’s parallel worlds, multiple temporalities coexist, love and antagonism entwine, and human feelings become “unhygienic”—the artist’s term for emotions that refuse the sterile logic of optimization.

Fresh from her LG Guggenheim Award in February, Kim’s first European solo exhibition “Many Worlds Over” at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof transformed the museum into a labyrinth of digital exhaustion, examining how algorithmic control fractures bodies and desire. Ghost Dancers B (2022) features two life-sized riders frozen mid-grapple amid shattered glass, blurring the line between conflict and embrace, while Ghost Dancers A (2022) presents disembodied helmets with cables trailing like severed spines, while footage of high-speed delivery routes streamed endlessly in the visors. Against the gallery’s dystopian blue walls, the manga-style wallpaper Evening Peak Time Is Back (2022) depicts the riders embracing with subtly erotic overtones.