Surya Suran Gied was born in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to a German father and a South Korean mother who was employed as a healthcare worker during the 1970s to provide for her family in South Korea. Together with a cohort of fellow immigrant workers from India, South Korea, the Philippines, and other Asian nations, they supported the FRG’s healthcare system through a deep crisis between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s. Like numerous migration stories of so-called contract workers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the Second World War, the ‘guest worker’ status came with a set of discriminatory gestures that often reduced those who received it to mere migrants seeking a better life, even though their presence was crucial to the FRG’s economy and society. Gied grew up with stories of the migrant conditions of the lives of her mother and her peers, as well as with those told at her grandmother’s house in Hwaho-Ri, Jeongub, a village in rural South Korea. Her artistic practice expresses and translates these historical and contemporary narratives of her community with visual aesthetics inspired by the design of godori cards, as seen in the multidisciplinary series Godori – Go Stop Ghost (2022–24), which she had played at her grandmother’s house. The act of playing godori became a way of trespassing the migrant condition of her mother by maintaining a sentimental practice that was part of a greater family structure she left behind in her departure from South Korea.

Works in the exhibition: All from the series Godori – Go Stop Ghost (2022–24): Wisteria (2022), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Moon (2022), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Climb and climb (2024), acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; In dreams paths take no footprints (2024), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Windows opening inward (2024), acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 cm × 80 cm; A bird wipes the sky clean (2024), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Clover (2024), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Iris (2023), acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm; Plum (2022), acrylic on canvas, 100 × 80 cm