Surya Gied: Godori – Battle of Flowers

With the solo exhibition by Surya Gied, recipient of the Ruckhaberle Award 2021, Museum Reinickendorf and Künstlerhof Frohnau present a multifaceted artistic practice that interweaves painterly techniques with oral history, photography, sound and video works, performance, and sculpture. Surya Gied’s current artistic research creates spaces and forms for multidimensional storytelling that link historical and contemporary living conditions and struggles of Korean migrants in Germany with those of Korean rice farmers.

In Godori – Battle of Flowers, Surya Gied weaves together various narrative and experiential threads into a collective biography of her grandparents’ house in Hwaho-ri, Jeongub, a small village in South Korea. In two installations combining painting, video, sound, and textile works, the house emerges in its material and social architecture. The stories of the women who live and lived in the house intertwine with the structure of the building or emerge from it. The clay walls and roof mats of the house were replaced with stone and bricks after Choonok Gied-Lee, the artist’s mother, emigrated to Germany and sent most of her monthly income as a nurse to her family over many years. Together with countless other Korean, Indian, and Filipino nurses who were recruited as “guest workers” in the 1960s and 1970s, she helped rescue the West German healthcare system from crisis. In South Korea, she and many other emigrants and migrant workers, with the support of their families, helped stimulate the national economy during the period of military dictatorship.

As we move through the exhibition spaces, we hear the artist’s aunts, mother, and grandmother speaking about life in the house, which they describe as a place of longing, alienation, and struggle, shaped by patriarchal conditions as well as by the capitalist devaluation of agricultural labor and ecologies. Elsewhere, their voices resound vividly as they are absorbed in the card game Godori, chatting and teasing one another, laughing and swearing. Drawing on selected motifs from the game, a series of paintings was created during Surya Gied’s residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau in the summer of 2021, in which plant, human, meteorological, and cosmic figures and movements find new constellations. In the exhibition, these works merge with relics from the site’s institutional and domestic infrastructure to form sculptural remixes, pointing to the cultural, biopolitical, and migratory histories of the former Frohnau forest hospital.

Until the late 1980s, the site housed an external branch of the Karl Bonhoeffer Psychiatric Clinic, where many Korean nurses worked. In 1998, Künstlerhof Frohnau was founded here on the initiative of the artist and curator Dieter Ruckhaberle. Surya Gied’s paintings absorb this patriarchal legacy, with all its rough edges, and turn it into a prosthesis. Irreverently, these sculptural organisms comment on the gaps within male- and white-dominated art and cultural histories, and on how that which constrains us can become something that sets us in motion.