Naming the Nameless is an exhibition co-organized by Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and Critical Global Studies Institute (CGSI) at Sogang University. This exhibition excavates the micro histories related to forced conscription during the Japanese Empire‘s colonial reign, and centers on various archival materials at sites of forced labor. The exhibition visualizes multiple issues concerned with forced conscription and forced labor, and at the same time attempts to tell the stories of anonymous workers who lived through much uncertainty.
This exhibition sheds light on the daily life of forced laborers and the traces at their residences, the site of forced labor that is now disappearing because of urban development, and the letters of workers and the inscribed memories on their tombstones. Furthermore, the exhibition provides an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of present day labor by exploring the documents of workers’ lives that have been easily forgotten in the vortex of modern and contemporary history.
The exhibition begins with the figures of workers and the coal mines where most of them were conscripted. Furthermore, actual objects and materials such as ‘Yoon Byeongryol Collection’ vividly show us the daily life of the workers. Additionally, the realities of forced work are revealed through the faces of workers who were mobilized into varied forms of labor, letters that never made it to their intended recipients, testimonials made by their family members, and tombstones that recorded those who died far away from home. The exhibition reinscribes the names that have disappeared from history, resonates with their will and experience of living, empathy and solidarity, and weaves networks of various meanings inherent in the act of labor. Presented at SeMA Bunker, built during the military regime in South Korea, the exhibition encounters the abyss of a mine that used to be a space of the forced laborer’s work and daily life, questions the act of redefining the past and living the present through labor, and crosses the in-between the space of multivalent meanings.
By linking about 200 archival materials and about 20 contemporary artworks, the exhibition unfolds a variety of stories like a panorama. Narratives take place such as of workers/fathers’ narratives, which hitherto have been largely invisible, gendered memories of mothers and wives that are embodied through archive materials, the present meaning of labor, labor and diaspora, and death and memory, and more are represented here in this exhibition. Through this we hope that the exhibition becomes a place of resonance that calls out the names of numerous individuals who have existed, but up to this point have remained invisible, to ‘exist’ here again.
