Join us for a performance by Ru Kim, held in conjunction with Spectrosynthesis Seoul.

Ru Kim, A performance about Courage in three chapters: War, Dogs, and Blood, 2025–2026, performance, 40 min

Artist & Director: Ru Kim
Co-choreographers & Performers: Kang Sieun, Kim Min, Ru Kim, Jiwon Yum, Lee Bom, Lee Yea Ji, Choi Jihyun
Music: Artur Pispalhas
Live music performance: WON (setsetset), Emon
Sound sculpture: HEXXX
Production advisory: Sam Blumenfeld, Simone Frangi, Jieon Lee, Katia Schneller
Technical advisory: Elliot Woods
Curatorial workshop: Jieon Lee
Performance feedback: Jihye Chung

This work reflects on the meaning of “courage” in an era of ecological catastrophe. Mother Courage, the title character of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children(1939), and Courage the Cowardly Dog, the protagonist of the animated series of the same title (1999–2002), are both fictional characters whose names contain the word “courage.” Taking these two figures as a starting point, artist Ru Kim imagines new entities that weave together animals, plants, and human and nonhuman life. These beings resist colonialism and anthropocentrism, dreaming of revenge against an oppressive order. To expose hierarchical structures, the artist juxtaposes the relationship between student and instructor with that between a dog and its owner. University students in Seoul are invited to participate in a workshop, where they collectively reconfigure the work through the process of developing the performance around the theme of “courage.”

Ru Kim
Ru Kim (b. 1995, Germany) draws on experiences of living across Germany, Cyprus, Canada, Korea and Brazil as a foundation for their practice. Their work interrogates violence embedded within structures such as patriarchy, imperialism, and colonialism, while exploring modes of resistance. In recent projects, Kim has turned toward imagining stories from non-human perspectives, re-examining familiar structures of power and opening possibilities for different forms of connection and coexistence.