Amsterdam-based Korean artist Aram Lee works across moving image, installation, performance and research, tracing how histories of occupation, colonial violence and militarisation remain embedded in objects, bodies, landscapes and ecological matter. Her practice is particularly interested in the material afterlives of these histories: externalised memories of occupied land, the persistence of toxic substances, and the ways in which institutions attempt to preserve, classify and control the remains of the past. Ethnographical museums become a particularly charged site for this inquiry, revealing paradoxes in which practices presented as preservation can also perpetuate violence.

Lee’s methodology is collaborative and deliberately porous, often treating her research as a process of mediation between different kinds of agents rather than as a solitary act of interpretation. These agents can be people (scientists, researchers, performers, historians) or marginalised and otherwise overlooked forms of matter and life: museum objects, microbes, water, soil, toxic substances, archival traces. This approach allows Lee to shift attention away from established human narratives and institutional categories, giving agency to things that have been rendered invisible, inert or peripheral.

In this podcast, we talk to Aram Lee about poisoned lands, toxic materials, restitution, and the use of artistic mediation as a way of making otherwise hidden continuities of violence, toxicity and memory perceptible.

Listen on the website of Radio Web MACBA. 

Photo credit: Aram Lee, “Every Worm Trampled is a Star”, (2025). Installation view, Buro stedelijk, Stedelijkmuseum Amsterdam, 2026. Photo: Peter Thijhuis