Min Yoon: A Pronoun of B / Karimah Ashadu: Crystalline

The Kestner Gesellschaft is proud to present two solo exhibitions this fall, featuring the outstanding artists Min Yoon (b. 1986, Cheonan) and Karimah Ashadu (b. 1985, London).

A Pronoun of B is the first comprehensive solo exhibition by Min Yoon. Born in South Korea and based in Vienna, Min Yoon works across drawing, painting, and sculpture to reflect on processes of artmaking and the institutional structures that shape art and its production. His work often expands into exuberant, multipart installations whose playful structures weave together a range of interests, contexts, and materials.

The letter "B" in the title of the exhibition is believed to have evolved from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph and a Proto-Sinaitic sign resembling the floor plan of a house. For Min Yoon, "B" represents a linguistic and spatial abstraction of the idea of one’s own space. Through "B", he initiates a reconfiguration of Kestner Gesellschaft that begins outside the building, where he alters the institution’s name above the main entrance. Some letters appear to have fallen, while others have been added, together forming the sequence NA DA UM. In Korean, this can be read as 나다움(na-da-um), meaning being oneself or being as one is. This play with language sets the tone for what unfolds inside the building, where the linguistic, spatial, and temporal dimensions of "B" are further explored through a new site-specific installation and newly created groups of paintings are presented alongside a selection of works from the past three years.

Inside, sculptures explore embodied experiences of time, waiting and the pressures of productivity. Paintings of hourglasses filled with the letter "B" turn the letter itself into a unit of time. A new room-encompassing installation extends this alternative measurement into physical space. Its 20.5-centimeter units correspond to no official standard, proposing a personal system that raises questions about how spaces and bodies are quantified. 

It is shown alongside works responding to Nadaum Books, a South Korean children’s book project propagating sexual equality and sex education discontinued after protests from conservative groups. Drawing on Byeoldakku, the playful personalization of any everyday object, Yoon’s banned book decorating becomes an act of unruliness, reclaiming space curtailed by censorship.

Yoon’s A Pronoun of B brings together spatial, temporal, and linguistic indeterminacies, turning measurement of the galleries—often the starting point for making an exhibition—into a work in itself.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock, with curatorial assistance from Leonie Funke. A publication will be released on the occasion of the exhibition.

Karimah Ashadu's films examine labor as an economic condition and a site where autonomy and value are negotiated. The Atlantic Ocean recurs in her work as material and witness, its histories of migration and extraction carried into the present. With Crystalline, the Kestner Gesellschaft presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by the Artist and Filmmaker, based between Hamburg and Lagos. At its center is the world premiere of the film WAVES (2026), in the domed hall of the former Goseriedebad bathhouse, alongside eight photographs and the sculpture Auric Field (2026). Her practice homes in on Nigeria, probing notions of independence and value through its people—butchers, cowboys, miners, motorcycle-taxi drivers, bodybuilders—in informal economies where daily labor secures survival and carries the dream of a self-determined life.

WAVES explores the quotidian labor of an informal car wash in the Oniru district of Lagos, on a strip of land recently reclaimed from the Atlantic. It follows men washing down vehicles, the camera flitting between car wash and ocean until the two mirror each other, as they recount in Hausa what brought them to Lagos. The photographs portray the film's protagonists wearing knock-off designer clothing, which becomes a means of asserting visibility, value, and proximity to an economy from which they are excluded. Worked with mixed media such as saltwater, the photographs retain a residue of salt crystals left as the water evaporates, bringing the Atlantic into the very substance of the work. Auric Field, a found copper water tank, bears Ashadu's impromptu line drawing of one of the film's protagonists, inscribing the labor represented in WAVES directly onto its surface. In the adjoining hall, the film Cowboy (2022) portrays a man in Tarkwa Bay who has devoted himself to the care of horses; as in WAVES, Ashadu explores vulnerability within performed masculinity and the forces that shape it.

Crystalline speaks to the creation of value: how it is formed and ascribed through natural processes, material transformation, and the informal labor economy. Together, the photographs and sculpture expand the artist's filmic practice into physical space. Water becomes residue, while the labor held within the film is translated into surface and form and imbued with materiality.

Curated by Alexander Wilmschen, with curatorial assistance from Berenike Arbeiter. A publication will be released on the occasion of the exhibition.