The project assumes a main theme that penetrates the contemporary era as “Dystopia.” Since its emergence as an antonym of utopia through, for example, the novels of celebrated writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and William Gibson, the term “Dystopia” has been enjoying great popularity with images of a possible future revealing the terrible heavenly secrets comparable to the Biblical apocalypse, destroying the human world for the last time.

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The idea of Dystopia is formed on the basis of the anxiety that there may not be any hope in the world we are now living in because the future would surely be worse than today. The imagination of terror and despair that there would be no more development in individuals, society, and humanity as a whole seems to be hanging over the daily lives of modern people. The bleak prospects represented by the term are expressed through a pessimistic depiction of individuals harshly oppressed, and their society strictly controlled. Dystopia is a narrative of the joy and doubt about technical development, passion for the near future, aspiration toward freedom and its loss, and great catastrophe interlocked with destructive desire. It seems to be a keyword containing the disruptive desire existing in the origin of humanity in the context of revelation.

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That is why the myth of Dystopia manifests itself as a blind faith. The form of dystopia, which takes apocalypse as security, acquires a sense of reality as if it has “already been with us” in the present. The stream caught nimbly by the mass media tends to portray our times as a “luxurious end” or “the last of blind faith.” There is an expansive list of keywords being discussed within our time. This list includes:

SF, Dystopia, Objects-Oriented, Non-human, Diversity, Queer, Body, Pleasure, Reality, Virtual, Connectivity, Ecology, Nature, Populism, Virus, Time, Space, Digital, Emerging technology, Images, and more.

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The tendency highlights the impact of the media as a “medium” on us, showing that it is intricately intertwined with the way we consume it. Social issues and problems reveal themselves through the media while their producers often summon them as tools. The afterimages of the split media have infiltrated deep into our daily lives while all those ideologies and narratives have been broken into pieces. So it may now no longer be impossible to embrace the times. Despite all that, however, can we tie the mixed ideologies with a single subject?

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Amidst the trend, Hotel, Dystopia intends to read through the keyword “Dystopia,” those falling down without adhering and fragments and pieces of the contemporary world existing in speculation but are not directed lucidly.

Thus, this exhibition contains five keywords as a topic for Dystopia.

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SF Imagination

Structured Universe

Possible Life 

Impossible Death 

Formation of New Kin

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The SeMA Bunker is occupied temporarily and given the name Hotel, Dystopia. The “Hotel” is expected to function as both “a place” and “a non-place,” fulfilling the tasks both private and public at the same time. The works to be explicated through five keywords face each other publicly at the place where they are arranged but privately separate themselves from each other to manifest secret spheres; thus creating a certain intersection point.

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