In his filmic works Ryu Biho explores human emotions such as mourning, suffering, despair and empathy, evolving from personal and political conflicts or ideological confrontations.
For Ryu, the starting point for Letter from the Netherworld – the title refers to the ancient myth of Orpheus’ ultimately tragic journey into the netherworld – was the image of a contemporary tragedy that pervaded the media world-wide in autumn 2015: a small boy from Syria, drowned while escaping across the sea and found dead on a holiday beach in southern Turkey. For the artist, the image is a symbol of our contemporary tragic reality.
In the exhibition space Ryu has engaged with this situation within the framework of an immersive spatial installation in the form of various stagings (“mises en-scène”), approaching the events from the periphery. In a presentation consisting of photos, video projections and a meditative sound work, with a total of five works, Ryu offers visitors the same number of “emotional spaces”, into which they can immerse themselves individually and pause for thought.