Song E Yoon: Songs Across Time

The history of humanity a history of communication. Long before the invention of writing, humans expressed thought, fear, and hope through gestures, sounds, markings, cave paintings, and symbolic carvings.

At the heart of these early systems of meaning stood the shaman, who provided guidance essential to survival. The signs and images left behind gradually evolved into systems of writing, allowing civilisations to preserve memory and knowledge across time.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré condensed this long trajectory of human communication into his life’s work. By creating the Bété Alphabet, he sought to preserve oral tradition and collective memory. His symbols function not merely as linguistic signs but as a prophetic system.

In dialogue with this legacy, Song E Yoon presents her petroglyph-like paintings and installations as another form of recording. Drawing from ancient human symbols, she re-inscribes them across walls and space through lines and luminous marks. Her work is a cartography of human journeys across millennia.

These works form a dialogue between recording and journey, memory and movement. Set within the historic architecture of Venice, itself an archive of accumulated time, the exhibition asks a timeless question: what do we record, and how do we remember?