Karolina Wilting

Veins of stone, trees of blood

In the deep core of the mountain chain, blood flows and binds grandmother to mother, mother to granddaughter and granddaughter to grandmother.

In this video installation, Karolina Hyun Wilting explores the intersection of many things: the afterworld, ancestral heritage, permanence, and transience weaving together memories, handmade ritual objects, and timeless entities. Through personal rituals, she opens a portal to another realm where the afterworld and the everyday life meet, and the timeless and the ephemeral coexist.

The paper cutouts are inspired by the Korean tradition of sacred paper cutting, a cultural practice involving the creation of ritual paper objects used in “굿” rituals to drive out evil spirits or commemorate the deceased.

Interwoven with the story of her grandfather’s mountains, the mountain becomes a totem, a gateway to ancestral space: the everlasting mountain as an anchor-point to our fleeting human existence.

Karolina Hyun Wilting is a German-Korean multi-media artist who delves deep into themes of identity, transformation, and the longing to belong. Her work is characterized by a deliberate oscillation between the intimate and the expansive, the mundane and the monumental, the subjective and the objective. Through this process, she uncovers complex layers of interconnectedness that transcend the boundaries of the individual allowing to reveal the profound within the ordinary.