SeMA Omnibus : At the End of the World Split Endlessly

The SeMA Omnibus is a large-scale thematic exhibition of collections which examines ‘Connection’, the 2024 institutional agenda, from the perspectives of genre, medium, time, and society. Adopting the omnibus form of storytelling that weaves independent short stories around a single theme, four different yet closely connected exhibitions are held at four locations: At the End of the World Split Endlessly (Seosomun Main Branch), I Want to Love Us (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art), Planet Nine (Nam-Seoul Museum of Art), and Fantasia of the Archive (Art Archives). It will be an opportunity to sense the dynamics and diversity of Korean contemporary art, where the characteristic keywords of the SeMA collection such as contemporaneity and female artists are discovered like a hidden object game.

At the End of the World Split Endlessly attempts to read the SeMA collection through the keywords of connection and combination between media. It is an exhibition that explores the inevitable structure of artists and their works through medium in the post-medium/post-media era, showing the multi-layered structure of medium/media of our time created by media that respond to technological and social changes such as old media and new media, virtual and real, AI and the body. The etymology of the word medium comes from the Greek words medium which means middle, and medius which means in between. In contemporary art, medium acts as a vehicle, a conduit, a psychic, and a connection, constituting layers of complex linkages that connect the work and the artist, the work and the viewer, and the viewer and the art museum. Following the keywords of the exhibition such as Old & New, Yellow Block, Layered Medium, and Open End as though clicking through them, one can see that the situation of the medium of the here and now exists as a multi-layered structure that is both singular and plural.

As the title of the exhibition that was inspired by anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Jorge Luis Borges’ novel The Garden of Forking Paths, artists are asking through their art, where we stand at the end of the world, in the midst of the climate crisis and the end of capitalism. Just as artists create works of art after going through various degrees of consideration over the process of selecting and renewing their medium, we paradoxically dream of new connections in an endlessly splitting world. It is not a perfectly seamless connection, but a connection that is already partial and broken. Art is telling us to take another look at this very imperfection and insufficiency, about the life, reflection, resistance, hope, imagination, and latent possibilities that still stir in the ruins of the wreckage.

○ Introduction of the Sections

Part 1: SeMA Collections Read through Medium

The museum's collections are expansively viewed as objects based on flexibility that are constantly moving and changing/navigating, rather than as fixed works of art to be preserved for future generations. Collections already have an ambivalent nature, not only as fixed, physical entities such as physical works, storage units, and management cards, but also as constructs of fluid, immaterial data such as collection search engines, images, and databases. With the diversification of contemporary art, the collections of art museums are not limited to the methods of collecting, preserving, or utilizing modern collections, but are open to the possibility of being newly established in conjunction with technological and social changes such as digital media, big data, artificial intelligence, and block chain. We propose the collection as a point of contact as well as a medium of connection that mediates the operation of the work and the artist, the work and the viewer, and the viewer and the art museum.

Part 2: Old and New

Understanding medium as a combination of technical conditions and conventions rather than a simple material foundation such as canvas or paint, the SeMA collection is examined within the categories of medium (painting, Korean painting, sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking & drawing, design). Medium categorization ironically reveals how interconnected and mutually referential such categories are. Painting complements and expands drawing, sculpture complements and expands installation, and photography complements and expands video. It reflects the contemporaneity of the medium in which old media and new media, and virtuality and handcraft coexist in colorful layers. An artist selecting a medium takes place not only in response to the form of the work, but also by the necessity of its content, new experiments and attempts on the medium, and changes in society and technology. Through medium in the post-media era, we not only think about the creative mechanism that projects changes within art, society, and technology, but also the reality of medium of this era that we are facing.

Part 3: Yellow Block

As the novel by Borges that went beyond the concept of absolute and uniform space and time and talked about fortuitous and relative time, this section goes beyond the linear concept of collections where art resonates with the past and records it for the future. Past, present, and future events are summoned to the here and now based on the Block Time theory, which states that events from all time periods, past, present, and future, coexist in various layers. In particular, it showcases the diverse use of medium by emerging artists, and functions as an inter-media box that presents various thoughts on medium by holding talks and workshops within the exhibition hall.

Part 4: Layered Medium

Highlights the layered realities of medium such as superimposition, hybrid, blending, and remix. It explores how a dynamic rhizomatic system that diversifies difference and plurality is hidden within the medium of the collection. Artists continuously weave the fragments of society, history, politics, and disasters that surround them into sensations, language, and aesthetic order. As it becomes possible to newly participate in the collection that is constantly summoned to the present, they are discovered as a new event in the sediments of time. The collection is constantly updated, becoming a 'present' that contains both the past and the future.

Part 5: Open End

Engages in open practice through connections with new medium. The focus is on the ability to ask new questions, and whether it is possible to discover the moments in which the potential is revealed in the networking between humans and objects, and animals and non-humans, such as the ability to create prompts in the AI era. To this end, we suggest a time for the viewers to experience the work themselves. Just as Kubo the novelist found his own path as he walked the streets of Gyeongseong 100 years ago amidst the era's flood of new culture and the weight of social censorship, we today participate in that open ending.