The third edition of to | da y to morr ow brings together two emerging practices that work at the seam between perception and projection, memory and imagination. HYEPAK (Hyejin Park) probes foreignness as an aesthetic and social disposition shaped by regimes of the gaze, technologies, and affects. Pauline Simon distills precise scenarios of perception from everyday phenomena in which time, space, and memory interlock. The exhibition space becomes a controlled experiment with clear parameters: for Park, an interface landscape that opens contact zones between human and nonhuman agents; for Simon, a phenomenological projection plane where a zone between memory and the present takes shape and remembered space re-manifests as lived experience.

 

In her installations, HYEPAK investigates the experience of being foreign—as an existential, social, and aesthetic apparatus. Her point of departure is the gaze, understood not as a purely visual act but as a force field of projection, normalization, and relation. Park translates these often unseen structures into spatial constellations in which perception, control, and coexistence materialize across the surfaces of image, object, and sound.

 

Central to her practice is a techno‑imaginary: technology appears not merely as a means of production but as an extension of sensibility and a locus for new forms of imagination and affect. 3D modeling, unconventional sculptural idioms, and video-based processes conjure beings, atmospheres, and sensations that oscillate between the human and the nonhuman. The figure of the alien marks a hinge between technological and anthropological imaginaries—a techno‑emotional counterpart that reframes estrangement not as deficit but as a conduit for new empathies.

 

In recent work, HYEPAK cultivates a purposefully ambivalent visual language. Kitschily playful elements—such as inflatable forms and bright palettes—rub against subtly unsettling shapes. The familiar and the unfamiliar collide, tilting perception: what initially feels disconcerting opens into an invitation to nonverbal hospitality. Park is also responding to her own experience as a Korean artist in Germany, one who knows, in embodied terms, the gap between language, expression, and identity. Where words falter or misfire, rhythm, color, material, and movement speak. Her installations become experiential spaces in which foreignness does not produce exclusion but forges relation.

 

HYEPAK’s practice reveals how identity emerges between self‑ and other‑perception. She presents subjects in the mirror of social expectations and cultural ascriptions while opening spaces where those reflections can be shifted, fractured, or multiplied. Foreignness becomes a productive category—a sensorium that recalibrates the conditions of perception, proximity, and recognition.

 

Pauline Simon treats space as a sensitive organism. Her work begins with a tactile inquiry—scanning a site, gently questioning its material, history, and structure—to surface subtle tensions between inside and outside, intimacy and publicness. She starts from the everyday and the barely noticed: a drifting patch of light in a bedroom, a fixed shadow on a wall, the soft plink of water into a bucket. These become exacting studies in perception. Simon is drawn to the latency of signals and their reverberations: what persists once an impulse is set loose in the world, and where its echo comes to rest. How do we read traces, carry concepts across, and derive meaning from them?

 

This concision is distilled in the suspended installation Memory Machine (2021), which reproduces a familiar yet rarely articulated situation: falling asleep at one’s grandparents’, saturated by layered sensory impressions. At its core is a tentative, wandering beam of headlight that slips through a window, slides across surfaces, and instigates a Kafkaesque play of light and shadow. The light is tender and, at the same time, almost violently breaches the private sphere. It draws a border between outside and inside, between public flow and domestic quiet, between world and body. The phenomenon reappears under shifting conditions yet is recognized as the same, foregrounding its curious transmissibility: a different room, a different car, a different headlamp, another street, season, or hour—and still the gesture of the light remains unmistakable. This invariance across changing variables forms an aesthetic core of the work.

 

To lay bare this essence, Simon reduces the situation to a few precisely calibrated elements. The window appears as an archetypal form at a model scale. Its proportions evoke a playhouse, conjuring a recollective relation to space shaped less by metric scale than by felt proximity. The car headlight implies the vehicle as an unseen cause, reflecting the world’s movement back onto the wall. A spotlight, with variable color temperature and focus, renders time and motion legible and marks the phenomenon’s transferability—almost as in an experimental set‑up, without the chill rigor of a laboratory. Crucially, this constellation generates its own quality, ushering viewers into a zone between memory and the present in which the wandering light becomes an index of time and the remembered room can be newly lived as experiential space. Memory Machine thus unfolds a quiet poetics of the ordinary, converting the seemingly banal into an experience of precision and intensity.

 

HYEPAK/ Hyejin Park (b. 1992, Seoul, South Korea) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Danica Dakić, Marcel Odenbach, and Johannes Schütz, graduating in 2025. She works primarily in video and installation. Exhibitions include: IMAI, LED wall at Kö‑Bogen, Düsseldorf; Julia Stoschek Collection; Goethe‑Institut Rome. She received the Grand Prize at the Gwanghwamun International Art Festival at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. Park lives and works in Düsseldorf; her practice unfolds between the cultural contexts of Germany and South Korea, focusing on perception, suppression, control, coexistence, and abandoned spaces and times—with a particular emphasis on contemporary debates around foreignness.

 

Pauline Simon (b. 2001, Duisburg) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2018 to 2025 in the classes of Rita McBride, Franka Hörnschemeyer, and Nina Canell; in 2024 she studied at the Beaux‑Arts de Paris. The same year, she was named Meisterschülerin (master‑class student) with Prof. Franka Hörnschemeyer, and she completed her Düsseldorf degree in 2025. Since 2025 she has been pursuing an MA in Art & Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Exhibitions include: We Don’t Actually Need Gravity, HGB Leipzig, Germany; What Is Steady Anyway?, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf; Parasite, Zeto Gallerie, Paris, France; What did You Expect?, Leopold‑Hoesch‑Museum, Düren.