Aftershock

Ivana Bašić Sihan Guo Yein Lee Diane Severin Nguyen Ittah Yoda

Podium is delighted to present Aftershock, a major group exhibition that explores the seismic reverberations of trauma and the transformative potential that lies in its wake. Inspired by the seismological concept, this exhibition parallels the earth's readjustment process following a mainshock with the existential experience of searching for alternative futures after a profound disruption. Just as tectonic plates shift and settle into new configurations, the participating artists probe the liminal space between devastation and renewal, inviting viewers to contemplate how one can revitalise without defaulting to, and being bounded by habitual operational logic.

In the face of seismic upheaval, our instinctual response is to seek immediate shelter, often rendering us incapable of processing the shock in real time. This primal reaction echoes our typical responses to trauma, where our psyche enters survival mode by rewiring mental pathways and synaptic transmissions to prevent emotional overwhelm. As we navigate the aftermath, a natural inclination emerges to cling to familiar coping mechanisms, which can inadvertently perpetuate cycles of distress. This exhibition draws inspiration from the geological phenomenon of aftershocks—where tectonic plates continuously shift and settle into new formations. By exploring these natural processes as a metaphor for healing and transformation, the exhibition invites the audience to contemplate how one might learn from these shifts to build alternative futures that transcend established norms. Aftershock poses a profound question: How can one tap into the core of trauma and create new paths forward that break free from habitual patterns?

Ivana Bašić investigates the transformation of subjectivities into otherness, taking shapes in metamorphic forms with shifting bodily and metaphysical identities. Charged by her early vantage point of violence and brutality brought on by the collapse of Yugoslavia, her enigmatic sculptures, which consist of wax, glass, steel, alabaster, oil paint, and immaterial matter such as breath and pressure, prompt the viewers to reimagine ontological fixations through a posthuman and post-subject lens radically. Her work is part of the exhibition ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses' at the ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2025), serving as Bašić's debut institutional presence in Southeast Asia. In addition, the artist has a solo presentation touring from Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2024) to Montpellier Contemporain (2025), and then to the National Museum of Art in Belgrade in the fall (2025).

Elsewhere, Sihan Guo's abstract paintings construct a landscape of techno-Gnostic fantasy. Evoking the idea of disintegration, absence, and self-erasure, the vessel-like, weblike, synaptic backdrop of dissolving sceneries enthral the viewers with the enigmatic liminality of presence and absence, reality and virtuality. Meanwhile, The duo Ittah Yoda, composed of Virgile Ittah and Kai Yoda, creates polysensory and therapeutic storytelling to envisage the post-anthropocene world where the natural and the digital realms interweave, fuse, and co-evolve in the dawn of ‘symbiocene'. Their sculptures, paintings, and installations echoing organic forms and materials and transcending the temporal—informed by virtual reality and information technology—are developed through intercultural creative collaborations with various artisans, manifesting into interconnected vessels that embody and share 'genetic-artistic' information from their environment.

Recently presented a large-scale commission at the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), Yein Lee's practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, and performance, depicting the body in fragmented forms and radical transitoriness. By repurposing industrial materials and interweaving elements of technology and physical organisms, her works investigate the social and ecological collapse, reverberating the voices of the otherness through the bodies in crisis. Lastly, Diane Severin Nguyen approaches digital photography as material and sculptural experimentation shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work also narrativises these tensions by examining the histories of power, victimhood, and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making. Her works were exhibited in international institutions, including recent showcases at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024), Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024), and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2023).

Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade, Serbia)

Sihan Guo (b. 1990, Beijing, China)

Ittah Yoda (b. 1985, Paris, France and b. 1987, Tokyo, Japan)

Yein Lee (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea)

Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, California, USA)