k-art in berlin
Get swept up in Jinran Ha’s restless algorithms.
Jinran Ha’s path began in Korea, where she studied design before spending time in London as an exchange student. The London vibe eventually led her to Berlin, where she enrolled at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
Jinran’s first encounters with the city were difficult to situate or process on demand. Experiencing moments of excitement and disorientation in equal measure, she recalls feeling as though the boundaries between her body and surroundings destabilized under the mandate of assimilation.
In a watershed moment, Jinran collaborated with the Koreanische Frauengruppe in Deutschland (KFD) on an exhibition held at Museum Quadrat Bottrop. Active since the 1970s, the KFD mobilized around labor and residency rights, restructuring aspects of German immigration policy through sustained political action. The exhibition involved extensive research and dialogue, culminating in close relationships with KFD members, including Kook-nam Cho-Ruwwe. On the final day, as the exhibition space was about to close its doors, all KFD members began singing their anthem unrehearsed. As voices filled the room, the collective’s sense of care and solidarity epitomized a means of existing across borders that challenged the need to assimilate and ultimately invigorated Jinran’s practice.
Giving the floor to ambiguity, Jinran now fluctuates between kinetic sculpture, performance, and digital systems. In doing so, she often approaches technologies such as generative AI and augmented reality from a critical standpoint, intent on disrupting, testing, and exposing their limits.
In Algorithmic Possession (2025), she focuses on the figure of Samsin Halmi, the Korean earth goddess of life, birth, and fate who is invoked in the KDF anthem. Having asked AI to generate an image of Samsin, Jinran faced the realities of a model trained primarily on Western-centric datasets. Rather than correct AI’s distorted, stereotypical outputs, she printed them, cut them into narrow strips, and installed them in an outdoor setting where they shifted in the wind. Algorithmic bias was accentuated and digital inconsistencies re-planted in physical experience, catching the reflections of viewers, questioning erasure in the name of optimization, and empowering bodies and stories excluded from the frame.
