Arriving at MoMA PS1 from Manhattan at dusk, the famous skyline in my mind’s eye, the transition to Ayoung Kim’s version of Seoul, with its fast and furious backdrop of highways and traffic and buildings, feels smooth and natural. Delivery Dancer Codex is her first institutional exhibition in the US, after winning the prestigious Guggenheim Award earlier this year. It is also the first time that the video installations comprising Kim’s Delivery Dancer trilogy are presented together.

Using a combination of live-action footage, animation and videogame simulation, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022) follows a young, female delivery driver called Ernst Mo (her name an anagram of “monster”), on a mission to deliver a series of unidentified products as fast and efficiently as possible. As Kim tells us at the preview, she conceived of the film during the Covid pandemic, struck by the idea that delivery drivers were one of the few mobile entities in a deserted Seoul in lockdown; she befriended a female driver, who invited her to come on a “liberating” ride on the back of a motorbike. Spiralling shapes suggest the driver’s routes through the maze-like city, dispatched by an entity called the “Dance Masters”. The camerawork in the highway footage is hectic, as if we are speeding along with Ernst Mo, accompanied by a mysterious, ambient soundscape. At times, the traffic lights and lit-up motorways blur into pure lines of colour, kaleidoscopic and spinning around like a fortune wheel.

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