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Artworks

Heritage on the Move
A Visual Ethnography of the Statue of a Girl of Peace
in Toronto and Berlin 

by Maria Kim

This visual ethnography explores how difficult heritage travels, settles, and acquires new meanings through mobility and emplacement. Through a series of photographs taken and acquired during ethnographic fieldwork in Toronto (Canada) and Berlin (Germany), the exhibition follows the journeys of the Statue of a Girl of Peace, a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery system during the Asia-Pacific War. Although the monument is replicated across different locations retaining a recognisable material form, the replicas occupy very different social, political, and spatial environments. The exhibition documents not only the monuments themselves but also their surroundings, traces of care and maintenance, offerings left by visitors, signs of activism, and everyday interactions that shape their presence within local communities. Rather than presenting the statues as fixed objects, the exhibition approaches them as mobile heritage. Through images of emplacement, visibility, concealment, accessibility, and public engagement, it examines how memories travel across borders while becoming embedded within specific local landscapes. The photographs reveal how difficult heritage is continually negotiated through relationships between people, places, institutions, and material environments.

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By placing Toronto and Berlin in dialogue, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the movement of memory, the politics of recognition, and the ways in which heritage becomes rooted in new cultural contexts. The project contributes to broader discussions on mobility, diaspora, public memory, and the transnational circulation of difficult heritage.

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Maria Kim (maria.jukna@doctoral.uj.edu.pl) is a PhD candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Jagiellonian University (Poland) and KU Leuven (Belgium), undertaking a joint doctorate within the Una-Her-Doc programme of the Una Europa Alliance. Her research explores the intersections of heritage, and mobility through multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Europe and North America. She is particularly interested in difficult heritage, mobility of meanings, diaspora communities, transnational memory, and heritage-making practices. Her current project examines how the heritage of "comfort women” is negotiated, mobilised, and reinterpreted within Korean diaspora communities in Canada and Germany.

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ORGANISED BY
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ARI
SUPPORTED BY
Konkuk University logo
National Research Founation of Korea logo
Korean Ministry of Education logo
PARTNERS
Asia Mobility Humanities Network logo
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