To time, to distance is a group exhibition featuring Alisa Berger, Daria Kim, Luiza Pârvu and Toma Peiu, co-curated by Tamara Khasanova and Junho Peter Yoon, recipients of the 2025 AHL–Andrew & Barbara Choi Family Foundation Project Grant. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public programs and held at the AHL Foundation gallery and across partnering venues, with a detailed schedule to be announced soon.

In To time, to distance four artists reflect on their belonging to and relationship with Koryo-saram communities (Корё-сарам, 고려사람) . Within the global Korean diaspora, Koryo-saram occupies a distinct position as an identity formed in the aftermath of the forcible deportation of Koreans living in the Russian Far East to Central Asia in 1937. Following the displacement, Koryo-saram built lives across Central Asia, primarily in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, developing idiosyncratic cultural practices within their diasporic contexts. To this day, some half-million Koreans who identify themselves as Koryo-saram (saram meaning “person” in Korean) live across countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and beyond, including South Korea and the United States.

The featured works straddle the personal and the historical in their own ways, opening up the exhibition to enduring conversations around the forced displacement of ethnic Koreans in the early 20th century and how its aftermath continues to shape the narratives of the Korean diaspora. If the self is inextricable from history, then it seems to dwell in the interface between the two that in turn sustains the twin questions of identity and belonging. For Berger and Kim, this tension is manifest in their concern with their Koryo-saram heritage—what is passed down or what persists from the past into their present, even if (or only) in mutated form. The filmmaker duo Pârvu and Peiu extend this further by tracing the dissemination of the Koryo-saram communities following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and early 2000s. Together, their practices attend to the inborn paradox of carrying the weight of history and the attempt to break free from it.