The French expression École Buissonnière implies the notion of students skipping school and hiding out in the bushes. This expression originates from the historical event of Martin Luther setting up a school in the bushes and founding a new religion in the 16thcentury.École Buissonnière signifies a spirit which resists the existing order, and is a metaphor of a space of contemplation and creation that is made possible through deviation.
The bush is a place where a murder takes place in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short novel In a Grove. The witnesses of the murder in the bushes describe the incident to the best of their own memory, but it’s difficult too bjectively gauge their authenticity. On the other hand, the police outside of the bushes are even less reliable because they can not essentially access an incidence that took inside the bushes. And it would be even more absurd to listen to the voice of the murdered. The truth behind the murder that takes place inside the bushes traverses across the incomplete boundaries between subjective memories and objective truth, to eventually lead to the question as to where to draw the boundary of the bush.
Truant: École Buissonnière questions the boundary between the visible and the invisible, and the dichotomous way of thinking on conformity and nonconformity, resistance and freedom, play and education, and presence and absence which we have constructed. Truant signifies absence and its inappropriateness while École Buissonnière, freedom through deviation. Thus, the meaning of absence slips between deviation and freedom. While the contradictory boundary between truant and École Buissonnièreis is clearly marked as the two ideas complement and repress each other, they indulge in the thrill of the delayed deviation and desires.
The artists of the 11thSeMA NANJI RESIDENCY— Seulki Ki, Inbai Kim, Daejin Choi and Simon Barkworth — focus on the boundaries that are created in between internal resistance and external intervention through their distinct artistic language. Each of the artists explores the ways in which the forces, generated between subject and object, material and its metamorphosis, creation and extinction, and signifier and signified, operate. Held during Open Studio, Truant: École Buissonnière is a question about things that are invisible, disappearing and unverifiable in ‘the exhibition society’ which is expected to constantly demonstrate, expose and verify. Where does the anxiety that makes invisible what is visible come from? Where does the deterrence force that makes visible what is invisible come from?
Truanct: École Buissonnière focuses on truths which will always remain unattainable to human, and the human ability to perceive which is just as inaccessible and limited, and thus must be always questioned. It is a short prelude to the physical movement, psychological relationships and philosophical transition that is generated and extinguished in the boundary between such truths and human perception.
Event
■ Opening Reception: 17th November, Friday 4pm
