From 21 September to 19 November 2023, The 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale THIS TOO, IS A MAP engages artists and practitioners from around the world in the notion of non-territorial mapping in order to model multi-spatial and multi-subjective histories and knowledge. Presented at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and five additional Seoul locations, several collaborating spaces, online, and through radio waves, _THIS TOO, IS A MAP _harnesses networks, movements, stories, identities, and languages that live outside of Western cartography, measurement regimes, and their ensuing epistemologies and worldviews. Its exhibition, programs, and publications diagram the contemporary states of trans locality and displacement that this organization of the world has produced, and demonstrate a present that, for better and worse, defies these delineations. The project suggests a necessary shift towards more mutable conceptions and coded representations of the world, to propose what a post-Western cartography might look like.
Led by Artistic Director Rachael Rakes, with Associate Curator Sofía Dourron, SMB12 includes new commissions in diverse media and material formats, editions, and performances alongside relevant artworks from the past several decades. At SeMA Seosomun and supported by SMB12, Agustina Woodgate's existing and new works The Times Atlas of the World (2012) and The New Times Atlas of the World (2023) render a new image of the world that is no longer an object of colonial expansion, but a combination of artistic imagination and neural net learning, an interplay between tangible geography and the territory of abstract concepts. In the same gallery, a new iteration of _Constant _(2022), a video installation by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner and supported by SMB12, explores social and political histories of measurement which, much like maps, produces abstract models of the world. The artists trace these histories while drawing relationships to the body and ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power.
Among the newly produced projects are two major works by US artist Torkwase Dyson. I Belong to the Distance 3, (Force Multiplier) (2023) is the result of several months of exchanges between the artist, curators, and choreographer, Kwon Lyoneun. These exchanges led to developing a common ground between the history of spatial liberation strategies in the US and Korea. Kwon Lyoneun's performance then responds considering states of belonging, place, and exclusion through movement. Dyson's new wall installation, finalized during the artist's stay in Seoul, maps a wealth of past and present research and further collects her encounter with the city's history and architecture.
Also showing at SeMA Seosomun, artist Christine Howard Sandoval has produced the new works Surface of Emergence (diptych) (2023) while at SeMA's Nanji Residency in Seoul. A series of adobe drawings on paper–making use of the complicated soil of Nanji itself, a former landfill–thematize the arch of Spanish mission architecture and propose the form as a site of Indigenous archive and futurism. Through meticulous drawing techniques and geometric forms, the works also respond to the use of arches in various l modern architectures. Using geometry and the grid as primary media, legendary American artist Channa Horwitz's immersive installation Orange Grid (2013-2023) takes over a second floor gallery. Consisting of bright orange gridlines that subsume the floors and walls of the exhibition space, and variously sized, moveable black boxes, the work explores the conceptual gap between the rigidly rational space of geometry and of human friction that intervenes to alter seemingly fixed conditions.
Human movement and friction is also present in Mercedes Azpilicueta's newly-commissioned series of soft sculptures that stem from an investigation of the histories of migration and the construction of communities and displaced identities in the Korean migration to Argentina, her country of origin. These are joined by a performance by pansori singer Lee Seung-hee and a sound piece that each derive from testimonies of Korean women who migrated to Buenos Aires over the past several decades. Also exhibited at SeMA Seosomun is _THE TUMBLE _(2023), a newly commissioned video installation by artist Chan Sook Choi, whose interest and research on deserts and the life and ecologies they hold led her to search for the tumbleweed–a desert plant that moves across landscapes due to the force of wind–and the gestures and layers that constitute the body through these movements.
Physical underground ecologies and its movements are explored at SeMA Bunker, where the collective Lo-Def Film Factory presents _The Subterranean Imprint Archive _(2021-2023), a VR work and installation supported by SMB12 that proposes a counter-archive that traces the legacy of technopolitics in Central and Southern Africa and thematizes the toll of a progress-driven world-system across the continent. Among other works at Bunker is _Prelude to: When the Dust Unsettles _(2022-2023), by Dutch artist Femke Herregraven, who focuses on the virtual and material exploitation of the Manono lithium mega-mines, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the toxic impact on people and land alike. Also exhibiting underground are solo presentations by artists Hyunsun Jeon and Bo Wang, at space mm and Sogong space, two independent galleries located in the commercial passageways connecting the City Hall and Euljiro stations of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway.
At Seoullo Media Canvas, an outdoor screen visible from an elevated pedestrian park known as Seoullo, Natasha Tontey's new short video Children of the Stones Number Two (2023) is one of the three works on view. Adopting the format of maximalist digital visual elements, the work speculates on the potential of Indonesia's Minahasan culture to imagine an alternative society based on the principle of reciprocity that unites animate and inanimate realms.
Jesse Chun's survey exhibition at the Seoul Museum of History, 시__, language for new moons,__ also unfolds new ways of viewing the histories, traumas, and poetics that percolate through Korea while embracing the linguistic abstractions that fracture the language's social and semiotic structures. Through video, sculpture, and drawing the artist weaves connections to her matrilineal history, Korean folk literature, and states of displacement and longing without belonging.
SMB12's exhibition presents over 60 works by Agustina Woodgate, Akira Ikezoe, Animali Domestici, Anna Bella Geiger, Anna Maria Maiolino, Archana Hande, Bo Wang, Chan Sook Choi, Channa Horwitz, Christine Howard Sandoval, Elena Damiani, Femke Herregraven, Francois Knoetze, Fyerool Darma, Guido Yannitto, Hyunsun Jeon, ikkibawiKrrr, Jaye Rhee, Jesse Chun, Jumana Emil Abboud, Kent Chan, Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson), Mercedes Azpilicueta, Miko Revereza, Natasha Tontey, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Raya Martin, Sanou Oumar, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Sasha Litvintseva & Graeme Arnfield, Shen Xin, Soyoung Chung, Steffani Jemison, Taeyoon Choi, Tenzin Phuntsog, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Torkwase Dyson, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, YOUR COMPANY NAME (Clara Balaguer and Cengiz Mengüç), and Yun Choi.
Press release courtesy Seoul Museum of Art | SeMA.
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