The SeMA Bunker brings Instruction for the Audience to its venue as its first exhibition of 2018. This exhibition is designed to establish the bunker’s discriminative identity and serve as an opportunity for viewers to have new experiences with art by intentionally dismissing any historical approach to deem such a bunker as a vestige of dictatorship or the scars of war. Ever since the bunker was founded in 2005 when the Seoul Metropolitan Government began construction on the Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, the general public has accepted the universal concept of a bunker due to several policies based on our preexisting notions and assumptions. This exhibition, however, focuses primarily on the existential concept of a bunker and intends to shed light on the SeMA Bunker as an underground utopia.
The Seoul Museum of Art views the bunker from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates architecture, archeology, literature, environmental planning studies, and psychology in order to establish its own ultimate ontology, keeping its traits pertinent to only the “underground.” Excavating a Neanderthal’s fossils or the remains of ancient Troy serves as an opportunity for us to interpret the act of digging in the ground as an epitome of cerebral explorations, thereby associating the underground with the discovery of truth. We normally bury all causes and effects in the earth when foot-and-mouth disease and the bird flu virus sweep the nation since such endeavors provide us with emotional stability. Underground structures are considered a preferred solution to destroying the ecosystem and the current environmental issues we face by virtue of this.
The ground for this is Gjøvik Olympic Cavern Hall, an ice hockey rink built underground for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. The emergence of similar underground buildings has positively contributed to the advancement of the construction industry and has been interpreted as a new resource of the material world, gaining legitimacy in terms of modern consciousness. The bunker, regarded as a secret space for only those who are chosen, comes into being with such a constructive background.
A bunker is usually interpreted as either a logistics base or a means for military operations. The SeMA Bunker, however, is differentiated from this definition. As the bunker located at the Yeouido Bus Transfer Center turned into a base to enjoy culture and art in 2017, it brought down those who were not considered when it was designed and refurbished. This point raises discourse on the new underground world the SeMA Bunker may have forged. This has the bunker work as a “superspace” through an overturn of each observer’s eyes while pushing beings and notions that are not involved with each other into an underground architecture. The audience isolated there will build their own utopia through their own dialectical thinking, facing a wide array of works.
The title, Instruction for the Audience is derived from Instruction for the Public Behavioral Strategies that guide viewers how to act in case of fire at the SeMA Bunker. It conveys paradoxical implications that the exhibition has to separate people who must follow the manualized evacuation method from the viewers who have to attain its completion as well as it introduced behavioral strategies for viewers to have new experiences while following presented coordinates. The exhibition declares an extraordinary artistic approach to take one step closer to our history and society. It is our expectation that the exhibition will serve as an opportunity for all visitors to the SeMA Bunker to gain their own artistic idioms.
