THIS TOO, IS A MAP opens

From September 21 to November 19, 2023, The 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale THIS TOO, IS A MAP engages artists and practitioners from around the world to model multi-spatial and multi-subjective histories and knowledge in the context of non-territorial mapping. Presented at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and five additional exhibition venues, and numerous collaborating spaces, as well as online and through radio, SMB12 harnesses networks, movements, stories, identities, and languages that exist outside of Western cartography and measurement, and their ensuing epistemologies and worldviews. 

Led by Artistic Director Rachael Rakes, with Associate Curator Sofía Dourron, SMB12 includes several new commissions and supported works alongside artworks from the past decades. At SeMA Seosomun, Agustina Woodgate’s works The Times Atlas of the World (2012) and The New Times Atlas of the World (2023) render a new visual conception of the world not as an object of colonial expansion, but a combination of artistic imagination and neural network learning.

Among the newly commissioned projects presented at SMB12 are two major works by 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. his work is the result of exchanges between the artist, SMB12 curators, and choreographer Lyoneun Kwon, which led to developing a common ground that unites the history of spatial liberation strategies in the US and Korea.  In addition, a new wall installation by Dyson maps past research alongside her encounters with Seoul’s history and architecture. 

Also on view at SeMA Seosomun are works by artist Christine Howard Sandoval created during her stay at SeMA Nanji Residency in Seoul. Surface of Emergence (2023) is a series of adobe drawings on paper that make use of the complicated soil of Nanji Island–itself a former landfill–and thematize the arches of Spanish mission architecture, proposing the form as a site of Indigenous archive and futurism. Mercedes Azpilicueta’s newly-commissioned soft sculptures stem from an investigation of communities and identities in the Korean migration to Argentina. These are accompanied by a performance by pansori singer Lee Seung-hee and a sound piece that derive from testimonies of Korean women who migrated to Buenos Aires. Also at SeMA Seosomun is THE TUMBLE, a newly-commissioned video installation by Chan Sook Choi that searches for the tumbleweed, an “invasive” desert plant that moves continually across landscapes. 

Various underground ecologies and notions of transience are explored at SeMA Bunker, where artist collective Lo-Def Film Factory presents The Subterranean Imprint Archive (2021–2023), a VR work and installation that traces the legacy of technopolitics in Central and Southern Africa. Among other works at Bunker is Femke Herregraven’s  Prelude to: When the Dust Unsettles,  which focuses on the virtualization of the material exploitation of lithium mega-mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Elsewhere, subterranean venues space mm and Sogong Space located in the passageways connecting the Seoul Metropolitan Subway host presentations by artists Hyunsun Jeon and Bo Wang, respectively.

At outdoor electronic screen Seoullo Media Canvas, Natasha Tontey’s new video Children of the Stones Number Two is one of three works being screened nightly. Adopting a digital maximalism, the work speculates on the potential of Indonesia’s Minahasan culture to imagine a society based on unifying animate and inanimate realms. Jesse Chun’s survey exhibition at the Seoul Museum of History, language for new moons, unfolds new ways of viewing histories, traumas, and poetics through linguistic abstraction and fragmentation. 

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.