Image: Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover
The Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover will present ‘A Pronoun of B’, the first comprehensive solo exhibition by Min Yoon, from 29 August to 15 November 2026. The exhibition will bring together installations, sculptures, drawings and paintings by the South Korea-born artist, whose work examines the conditions of artistic production and the institutional structures that shape art and its making.
Born in 1986 in Cheonan and based in Vienna, Yoon studied applied arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2011 to 2018 and uses playful, multipart installations to connect questions of language, identity, space and time. The exhibition’s title provides its central conceptual starting point: the letter “B” is linked by the institution to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph and a Proto-Sinaitic sign resembling the floor plan of a house. For Yoon, the letter becomes a linguistic and spatial abstraction of the idea of having one’s own space.
That idea will extend beyond the gallery interior. Yoon will alter the name sign above the Kestner Gesellschaft’s main entrance, where some letters appear to have fallen away and others have been added. The resulting sequence, “NA DA UM,” can be read in Korean as 나다움 (na-da-um), meaning being oneself or being as one is. Inside, new site-specific installation work will reconfigure the institution’s spaces, alongside newly made paintings and selected groups of works from the past three years.
The exhibition will also treat measurement as an artistic subject. Sculptures address embodied experiences of time, waiting and pressure to remain productive, while paintings of hourglasses filled with the letter B turn the character into a unit of time. A new, room-spanning installation will translate that alternative system into physical space through units measuring 20.5 centimetres. The measurement is not an official standard, but a personal system that prompts questions about how bodies and spaces are quantified.
A group of books connected to the Nadaum Books project will be shown alongside the installation. The South Korean children’s-book project addressed sexual equality and sex education before being discontinued following protests from conservative groups. Drawing on the idea of Byeoldakku—the playful personalisation of everyday objects by young people—Yoon’s decoration of banned books is framed by the institution as an act of disobedience that reclaims space restricted by censorship. The exhibition thus brings linguistic, spatial and temporal uncertainty together with the physical surveying of the gallery itself.
Yoon has previously had solo exhibitions at Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich (2024), Galerie Lars Friedrich in Berlin (2023) and the Neuer Essener Kunstverein (2021), and his work is held in public collections including the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, mumok in Vienna and the Wien Museum.
‘A Pronoun of B’ is curated by Eva Birkenstock, director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, with curatorial assistance from Leonie Funke. A publication will accompany the exhibition. The opening will take place on Friday, 28 August, at 7pm, with free admission; a family programme runs from 3pm to 5pm. On Saturday, 29 August, at 11am, Yoon will discuss the exhibition with Manuela Ammer, curator at mumok in Vienna, and a lecture by Dr Gürsoy Doğtaş follows on 17 September at 7pm.
The same evening the Kestner Gesellschaft will open a second solo exhibition, ‘Crystalline’ by Karimah Ashadu, curated by Alexander Wilmschen. The Kestner Gesellschaft is located at Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover.
