DAA Curatorial Research Platform

✨️A little about the person behind DAA: Yewon Kim is a curator, researcher and founder of DAA, with over a decade of delivering major international exhibitions across Europe, Asia and North America. Trained in Architecture (RIBA Part I) before specialising in Contemporary Art, she approaches every project as an embodied environment, one that shapes how people think and feel the world around them. At the heart of this practice is a deep belief in care, in how art and its conditions of encounter can attend to the people within them, to communities and to the wider human conditions that shape how meaning is made and experienced. DAA is built from cross-disciplinary exchange, operating as a platform for research-led dialogue and spatial thinking, with a particular interest in the conversations between art, architecture and scientific inquiry. @yewonkim.archive ✨

✨️Thank you from DAA✨️ Ten years on, we returned to Zaha Hadid with those who worked and walked alongside her. Curators, architects, journalists, writers, artists, historians, and audiences across different fields gathered for the evening. At times emotional, at times full of laughter, it brought back the ambition and legacy of her work, a force that never asked permission of convention. It felt especially meaningful to begin DAA in this context, with an ethos of gathering like minded thinkers and practitioners, and creating space for exchange. It has also been quite overwhelming, in the best way, to see over 300 people choose to follow and join the journey in just a few weeks. I’ll share a few moments from the evening over the coming days. Thank you everyone ✨ @daaplatform @yewonkim.archive

✨️Just Launched✨️ @daaplatform DAA is an independent, interdisciplinary curatorial and research platform, founded on the belief that the most generative ideas emerge where disciplines intersect, with a particular interest in the conversations between art and scientific inquiry. Conceived as an open and evolving framework, DAA develops projects that explore how artistic practice can engage meaningfully with broader social, scientific and cultural questions, and how curatorial work can function across and beyond institutional and market systems. DAA prioritises collaboration, critical exchange and long-term inquiry, creating space for artists, researchers and institutions to explore new forms of exhibition-making, dialogue and knowledge production. Founded by @yewonkim.archive ✨ March 2026

Bye, @whitecube I’m glad my last show here was Katharina Grosse’s Bermondsey exhibition. A colour blast felt like the perfect way to close this chapter. Eleven years is long enough for a place to become woven into the structure of your life, through the strange intensity of building exhibitions together again and again. So much of exhibition-making exists in forms, in people, that remain invisible in the name of art. I understand that unsung labour differently now, and with deepest respect. I’m stepping toward a more intellectually and curatorially self-authored life, becoming more fully myself again. There is so much I’m excited to build with my @daaplatform and through projects that are beginning to take shape. Independence is a word that comes with anxiety in some ways, but also an exciting one.There is something deeply meaningful about building something that feels entirely my own. I hope to create wonderful things with many amazing artists, friends, and collaborators in the field as this new chapter unfolds. “I had to paint my way out.” — Katharina Grosse photo 2: Me in 2015 at reception, with Gilbert and George's Banner 🌸✨️

@kettlesyard Kettle's Yard is someone's house. Jim and Helen Ede lived here. The furniture is theirs. The books, the piano, the light coming through the windows, all arranged for their daily life. Their mornings, afternoons, and evenings. When you're there, it feels intimate. You can sense the accumulated time, the stories held in each object. It takes you back to a time you never witnessed, like reading someone's diary. So you move carefully, slowly, because it feels wrong not to. There's also something about hospitality. About being invited into someone's home rather than announcing yourself. An invitation you accept. And with that comes a gratitude. Yet the house welcomes you fully. Sit in any chair. Stay in the study as long as you need. The space holds researchers and visitors alike, each dwelling in their own thoughts, for however long they like. And the objects. Pebbles on windowsills, ceramics placed just so, the lemon, a Nicholson on the wall beside a worn sofa, Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures on a table rather than on pedestals. You encounter the work before you've decided to encounter it. It allows you, a life, to meet artworks on equal terms. No spotlight, Just natural light soaking each room through the generous windows. The house itself is restrained, unassuming. White walls, simple volumes, nothing competing. The architecture steps back so the objects can sing. The Edes simply lived with what they loved, arranged the way you arrange things in a home, by what feels good to live with. "Come in as often as you like," Ede wrote in 1964. "The place is only alive when used." The house holds all of it without fuss, as Ede wished. @kettlesyard #curatorialthinking 🌸

Florence, 2012. I lived in Florence for two months over the summer for an architecture and art interdisciplinary program, taught by architect/artist Franco Pisani. One of the most magical periods of my student life. I stood in front of Michelangelo's Dawn for a long time. Photography wasn't allowed in the Cappelle Medicee, so I did a quick sketch of her. I always had a sketchbook with me back then, along with my Rotring Isograph pen. Brown ink, not black, as I felt brown was less conclusive, harsh. I worked out the weight of the Dawn's reclining form, the tension in the body that seems suspended between sleep and waking. On the way out, the gift shop was full of perfect reproductions I could have simply bought. I found that funny. But by then something haptic between me and the Dawn had already happened. Growing up, I was the kind of student who got lost in time in the art studio. My art teacher gave me the keys so I could paint through the weekends. I'd arrive in the morning and look up to find it was dark. That side of my life gradually faded as my career moved but it didn't disappear. If anything, it sits at the core of how I understand art. As something lived. The duration of thinking, seeing, making, the doubt, the hesitation, the circling. And then, sometimes, the moment when you arrive at what you were looking for. It's part of how I see art and artists now. And what I try to bring into a my curatorial work. Dawn is one of four allegorical figures of Time Michelangelo placed on the Medici tombs. Dawn, Dusk, Day, Night. Together they mark the hours that pass regardless, the slow erosion that even the most powerful life cannot resist. She seems caught mid-emergence, not quite awake, her face carrying something closer to reluctance than renewal. Rousing into a world that has already begun without her. Opposite her, on the same tomb, lies Dusk. They share the same stone, the same pose, the same unresolved face, but move in opposite directions. Between them, the full arc of a day. Michelangelo, Dawn (Aurora), 1524–31 Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Cappelle Medicee, Florence #크로키#croquis

Thinking of my studio visit to @hannah.flashed.that in Seoul. Woo Hannah lives with her sculptures before she complete them. They stand half-formed in her living space for 3-4 months, sharing the same air, the same passing hours. She does not rush to impose intention. Instead, she waits for the piece to begin speaking back. “Who are you, really?” she asks, and only when its temperament, its voice, has revealed itself over time does she give it the form it has been asking for. Her work is born from this long coexistence. Each piece feels like a being that has finally found the right way to exist, by her gentlest care and attention. Her material is fabric. Considered domestic, feminine, laboursome. We expect it to be quiet. And then it doesn’t. Standing before many fabric works, I often feel something I did not anticipate, monumental force, an earthshaking presence. And with Hannah's cotton-filled fabric sculptures there is an uncanny tactility of human being. The softness, it turns out, is not a limitation, but it is exactly what makes the impact so complete. Fabric holds the memory of the body in a way metal never could. Hannah shared with me the deep sorrow she felt seeing her work installed in a way that didn’t fit its character. She said, “The work must have felt so uncomfortable in such a site.” To her, it wasn’t just an object, it was a misplaced soul. This sensitivity to how a work feels in space is not sentimentality, it is a kind of ethics, the belief that even an object deserves the dignity of the right conditions in which to be itself. There is, in her practice, a gentle insistence on the time of acquaintance. Before we decode and interpret to understand, we are asked simply to remain with the work, to notice how it meets the artist, and how the artist meets it. In this, her sculptures suggest another way of being with what we care about. Allowing things or each other, to become themselves without haste. Ultimately, this is also an essence of a curator’s role. To become the guardian of the 'rightful place' for works to breathe. @ggallery.kr @daaplatform

Panel recap: 𝑩𝒆𝒚𝒐𝒏𝒅 𝑪𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 - 𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒕 𝑾𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 🎤 Swipe to explore what we learned together from Alexandra Steinacker-Clark @alexandrasteinacker , Adeola Gay @theotherartgirl , and Yewon Kim @yewonkim.archive @daaplatform ! Three trajectories, three ways of navigating the art world beyond linear paths. What stayed with us were not fixed answers, but ways of thinking and the understanding that there is no single way into the art world. 🎨✨ Sponsored by Living Things @drinklivingthings and supported by Arts Student Union @artssulondon Photographed by @fiona.hyu

There is an urgency particular to the caregiver, the "giver." Before anything happens, we are already anticipating: the school admin, the illness, the meltdown, the finances. This is the nervous system of the one who lives three steps ahead so things don't fall apart, before any other capacity, work, making art, has a chance to take hold. "Care", we say, as if it were soft. An instinct. A temperament. But care is also an unglamorous and relentless kind of duty, the invisible architecture that keeps a day from collapsing. "Giver" sounds voluntary. Yet the giver is so often the one who cannot step away. It is an inherited responsibility, passed down through love rather than choice. Holding an open umbrella over other people's futures. As Hettie Judah has articulated, the problem is not caregivers' commitment but an art world built around the assumption of the unencumbered worker, consistently sidelining those whose time and mobility are shaped by care. For artists, every invitation, every residency arrives with an intense calculation: can my life, my body, my work carry the weight of this too? The cost of saying yes is never mine alone. I think of Korea, my home country, and its birth rate of 0.7. That number is the sound of a generation calculating, rationally, that there is not enough space, time, or institutional willingness for a caregiving life to breathe alongside everything else a person might want to be, has to be. The caregiver may take different forms, and the role shifts across a lifetime, as does the weight. Care is not an afterthought or a personal choice. It is an irreducible condition. The ground everything else is built on. Following Fatoş Üstek's call for institutions to unlearn and relearn how power operates within them, I want this conversation led by those who carry the weight. With deep love and gratitude to the artists, writers, and curators I've been in conversation with around "care." The list is growing and I'll keep returning to this. @carolinewalkerartist @hettiejudah @fatosustek @eddie_peake @danicalundy #chanteljoffe @ellieshipman @jinmeyerson @tiffchae @july_0725 @anitakleinart @mvandenbrouck @barry__phipps

At a recent Association for Art History conference held at the @cambridgeuniversity , Tiange Zhou (Beijing Normal University School of Future Design), remarked that the one thing AI will never be able to simulate is: "the choking ache of a plum seed caught in the throat." In Eastern medicine and philosophy, there is a term for this: Maehaekgi (梅核氣). The closest Western medical terminology would be pharynx neurosis. Maehaekgi (梅核氣) describes the sensation of a plum seed firmly lodged in the airway. It is not a physical object, but the somatic manifestation of unexpressed emotion. A state of absolute impasse. It can neither be swallowed down nor spat out. An algorithm can calculate the mass of a plum seed or the biomechanics of the human throat, but it can never truly embody that sudden, irreducible urgency, the sensation. It has no body to ache. It possesses no "interior" for a full sensation to linger in, to be felt. I sometimes find myself thinking of reality as this very seed, something that refuses to be swallowed or resolved. It is a visceral form of knowing, one that exists before language and entirely beyond systems. Perhaps what makes us human isn't our ability to think, but our capacity to feel this pressure of existence. A bodily presence that hesitates, that aches, and that stubbornly refuses to be numbed to the hurt. I'm grateful to be invited by a Korean publisher to write a book on curating in the era of AI, and I will go deep into this. Artwork:@louise___giovanelli #humaness#ai#aiarthistory#curatingai @daaplatform @forarthistory @cambridgeuniversity

My recent text on the contemporary London art scene will be published in the summer issue of @artnow_official @noblessekorea Thinking through Byung-Chul Han and Carlo Rovelli on relation, duration, and what it means to stay long enough to actually meet. On the invisible lines we face, and the rooms where, sometimes, they dissolve, and what we lose when we move too fast to notice.💭⏳️ @daaplatform @byungchulhanoficial @carlitorovelli #byungchulhan#carlorovelli#gatekeeper

Hair is not the body. It is not the mind either. It lives somewhere in between. There is a Confucian teaching: 신체발부 수지부모 (身體髮膚 受之父母), The body, hair, and skin are received from one's parents, and must not be harmed. Hair was lineage and rootedness. In Joseon-era Korea, cutting one's hair was seen as a literal severance of the bond with one's ancestors. The Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum makes drawings from her own hair. She coils single strands across paper, forming circles that accumulate. She rolls hair into beads and strings them into a necklace. Hatoum was stranded in London during the Lebanese Civil War, unable to return home. Her body was elsewhere, unrooted, suspended. Her hair was the only language her body had left. By coiling that matter into art, she insists on presence. Hair does not decay the way flesh does. It outlasts us. In Korean shamanistic tradition, hair was understood to hold the soul. People kept the hair of those they loved. When someone died, their hair was burned or buried with care. In a world of fleeting digital connections and bodiless, physical displacement, there is something deeply grounding about the physical reality of a strand of hair. They are so fine they are almost nothing. And yet they are proof that someone was here. That there were roots. That something was held, even after everything else was let go. #monahatoum #mindandbody #humanness #신체발부수지부모 #Rootedness