DANIEL BOYD: FINNEGANS WAKE

KUKJE GALLERY is pleased to present Daniel Boyd’s solo exhibition Finnegans Wake, on view in the gallery’s K3 and Hanok spaces.

December 9, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Born in Cairns, Australia, and of Indigenous heritage, Boyd has long sought to reclaim perspectives and memories erased within Eurocentric historical narratives.

His practice expanded during his residency at London’s Natural History Museum in 2011, where he researched the museum’s expansive collection, including artifacts related to Australia’s earliest penal transportation fleets. Grounded in a critical awareness of colonialism, epistemological systems, and cultural values, Boyd’s work examines power and mythmaking embedded within Romanticist aesthetics. Through his distinctive use of the “lens,” Boyd continues to contemplate the unseen, the unspoken, and the unrecorded.

The exhibition features over 30 new works that build on the artist’s longstanding inquiry into hegemonic visual regimes that structure modern history and its representations. The title is taken from the 1939 novel by James Joyce (1882–1941), Finnegans Wake, in which the continuously shifting, dreamlike narrative structure parallels Boyd’s own practice.

The installation creates moments in which viewers witness events they do not directly experience with an “external gaze,” framing how history is shaped by selective narratives and points of view. Boyd invites visitors to enter into the work itself, expanding the viewer’s perceptual layers towards a necessary plurality.