Artist: June Yeom

Four Voices of the Camellia originated as a site-specific performance developed for Museumsnacht Dresden 2026 at Schloss Pillnitz, as part of the programme „Kulturelle An(gst)eignung?“, a collaboration between HfBK Dresden and HGB Leipzig.

At the centre of the work is the historic Pillnitz camellia, which has grown in the palace gardens for more than 250 years. Encountering the tree as a Korean artist and as a foreigner living in Germany, the artist began to reflect on questions of migration, belonging, displacement and being perceived as foreign.

The work also imagines the absence of the dongbak bird, a bird associated with the camellia in Korea through a symbiotic relationship. Its absence opens a space to question what, and whose, presence is missing when the tree is encountered in Pillnitz.

In the original performance, visitors were guided through the gardens towards the historic Camellia House, encountering different voices through headphones: the tree, the imagined bird, the glasshouse, the place itself, or voices that could not be clearly attributed. The site was experienced through sound, eventually leading to the figure of the absent bird.

For the Neustadt Art Festival, Four Voices of the Camellia is reformed as an installation. Since the site-specific performance cannot be reproduced outside Pillnitz, its documentation becomes part of a new encounter. Through film documentation and a participatory installation, visitors are invited to enter the relationship between the camellia, the absent bird, the original site and the artist’s position as a foreigner living in Germany.