Bonner Kunstverein presents Circus HQ, the solo exhibition by Peter Mertes Scholarship recipients Yoora Park.
Yoora Park creates spatial, site-specific installations that typically emerge from the interweaving of objects, video, and sound, and often uses the latter as their central medium. They possess a hallucinatory, almost surreal quality that articulates a shift in the order of perception. By taking everyday noise out of their familiar contexts, slowing them down, or transforming them through layering, Park destabilizes both architectural and physical arrangements, revealing them as tangible constructs. Sound, sculpture, and gesture become intertwined, blurring the boundaries between each media; the exhibition space emerges as an acoustically and physically permeated experiential context. Park’s technique of medial overlay evokes the uncanny as much as sedimented, often superimposed histories and temporalities. Reality and perception, fact and narration enter an unstable relationship.
The starting point of her exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein is both an archaeological excavation in South Korea that halted the construction of modern high-rises, as well as Bonn’s history as the former federal capital and hub of intelligence activities in the last phase of the Cold War. For the presentation, Park draws on existing materials from the art association and found objects such as doors, wooden planks, and speakers, which she repurposes into box-like objects equipped with sound elements. Drawing inspiration from the “dead drops” used for espionage—hidden caches for secret information and materials—they serve as mechanisms for both storage and circulation, simultaneously highlighting the inherent instability of information. The transformed objects give rise to liminal spaces: transitional areas that defy a clear temporal or functional categorization and oscillate between a before and an after, a past and a present. The ephemeral nature of sound intensifies these shifts and raises questions about reproduction, memory, and the fidelity of playback: When does the copy fully shift into difference, when does interpretation become an autonomous assertion? In this sense, Park’s works appear as a kind of structural haunting: as resonant spaces for distant, concealed, or repressed histories. Her hauntological approach creates situations in which objects, spaces, and sounds are simultaneously present and yet absent or withdrawn, and in which the conditions of authorship and control are renegotiated. Within this approach, the immaterial presence of sound becomes intertwined with material absences, revealing that power does not reside in the object itself but within the infrastructure that orders it. Thus unfolds a landscape in which the past is not concluded but lives on as a continuous vibration in space.
Yoora Park (b. 1991 in Ulsan, KR) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at the Kunsthochschule für Medien (2014 to 2020). She has exhibited throughout Europe, including presentations at Parloir Milan Contemporary Art Salon, Milan (2025); Kunstverein Gastgarten, Hamburg (2025); Löwengasse, Cologne (2022); K21, Düsseldorf (2021) and at the Städtisches Museum Wesel (2021). Park is the recipient of several awards and honors including the ARS VIVA Prize (2027), the Chargesheimer Scholarship for Media Art (2023) and the prize for young artists of the association FRIENDS of KHM (2022). Her works are represented in collections such as the Kunstsamm lung Nordrhein-Westfalen. She lives and works in Düsseldorf.
With thanks to the Peter Mertes Weinkellerei for their generous support.
