Fiction Pyongyang

YouTube Link

Fiction Pyongyang, curated by Joseph Grima together with Stefano Boeri and Armin Linke, is a video-portrait of Pyongyang, North Korea. Read an interview with Stefano Boeri here. The video shows Pyongyang as a glamorous modern city, with beautiful lights, huge billboard ads and nuclear weapons existing side by side.

The enormous triangular building you see in the video is the Ryugyong Hotel. Back in 1987, the North Korean government decided to build the hotel as a "cold war" response to a South Korean company’s completion of the Westin Stamford Hotel in Singapore. The Ryugyong Hotel was never completed due to lack of foreign investment. If it was, it would have been the world's tallest hotel.