Exhibition View ⓒ Bang Yukyung
The 11th Seoul MediaCity Biennale, delayed for a year due to the global pandemic, opened on Sep. 8. This biennale, which was held at Seoul Museum of Art was directed by Yung Ma, the first foreign artistic director in the history of the Biennale. As he prepared the exhibition during the ongoing pandemic situation, Ma decided on the theme ‘escapism’. Inspired by the US sitcom ‘One Day at a Time’ in which contemporary issues such as racism, class, gender, migration, identity, and gentrification are addressed directly and discussed under the guise of comedy, Ma picked ‘One Escape at a Time’ as the title. By using a detour known as art, the 41 participating teams in this exhibition explore how an individual can voice one’s opinions regarding a range of social problems, and how art can act as a medium for communication during the pandemic era. Displaying works such as Hong Jinwon’s Good Afternoon, Good Evening, Good Night v.2.0 (2021), which defines the auto-play algorithm used in capitalist online platforms as a form of visual politics and proposes an alternate video subscription service as its subversion; Liu Chuang’s Love Story (2013/2021) in which the scribbles of female immigrant workers written in the margins of romance novels from the 1980s and 1990s purchased wholesale from a rental bookstore are posted and reconfigured all over the exhibition space as a new form of archival practice that collects personal stories and their conversations; and DIS’s video A Good Crisis (2018) which, taking the appearance of a TV advertisement, savagely criticises the failures of US economic policies after the financial crisis. This exhibition repurposes a current trend in which mass media such as movies, dramas, and K-Pop as well as media environments such as Google, YouTube, and social media (SNS) are gradually becoming personal shelters. It is hoped that this design will expands on present contact points for communication from the individual level to a growing sense of social solidarity. This exhibition runs until Nov. 21.