Installation view of 《Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors》 ⓒ Ilmin Museum of Art
Ilmin Museum of Art presents the exhibition
《Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors》
in celebration of the building’s 100th anniversary, on view through May 31.
Originating from the Dong-A Ilbo building
completed in 1926, the museum is a site that has accumulated the temporal
layers of Korea’s modern and contemporary history. Interpreting this
historicity as an “unfinished present,” the museum poses questions through this
exhibition about the ways in which contemporaneity continues to unfold.
Installation view of 《Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors》 ⓒ Ilmin Museum of Art
The exhibition title Gi.Gi.Gi (奇.己.氣) layers three
distinct meanings of the syllable “Gi.” The first Gi means “weird” (奇). When things escape the bounds of normality and alter causality,
they connect naturally with things that do not exist here.
The second Gi means “self” (己). The chaos that arises when the position represented by the “self”
remains unfixed is something that smears and amplifies into the body,
substance, and systems. The third Gi means “energy”(氣).
It refers to states of the world that are unable to be transposed but can only
be fathomed in terms of indefinite ambiguities, such as atmospheres,
reverberations, currents, and vibrations.
Based on this framework, the exhibition is
a setting for predicting the outside based on what is present here (奇), performing the outside through bodies, substances, and systems of
unspecifiable coordinates (己), and expanding an
external sense through atmospheres that cannot be measured in terms of presence
or absence (氣).
Installation view of 《Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors》 ⓒ Ilmin Museum of Art
The “trial-and-error” implicated in the exhibition’s subtitle
typically refers to a process of converging on a right answer, but the attempt
made in the exhibition is less a matter of yearning for something purely
“outside” and more like the awkward awakening to a reality marred by lethargy
and emptiness.
Much like the entanglements of dreams, desires, and contingency
that surround the museum—or like the establishment of something new where
something else burned down—the artists adopt as a foundation the omens of an
“endlessness” of contemporaneity.
Participating Artists: Song Min Jung, Agnes
Questionmark, Unmake Lab, Eoghan Ryan, Yoo Jio, Jennifer Carvalho, Hong Eunju
