Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits

Now this should be one of the highlights of the UAE’s exhibition year, not just because of the content – it’s subtitled explicitly ‘Contemporary Art from Korea, 1960s to Today’, and South Korea is home to some of the most interesting, groundbreaking work of the last few decades years; and the exhibition design reflects that.

The exhibition is a selection of works from the Seoul Museum of Art, curated by SeMA’s Kyung-Hwan Yeo and Maya El Khalil for the Abu Dhabi Festival, and it aims to cover the “legacy of material and conceptual combination, exchange, hybridity, and innovation” in the radical Korean contemporary art scene. The title echoes Nam June Paik’s vision of ‘open circuits’, where connection and meaning flow beyond boundaries; so the exhibition immerses the viewer in “the fluid intersections of consciousness, technology, and art”, specifically showing “how artists work with varied technologies to intervene in, interpret and mediate different scales of experience, from the individual, the archival and the collective, to the abstract and yet to become …”

It opens with a curatorial discussion (5-6pm) featuring Kyung-Hwan Yeo and Maya El Khalil with artists Byungjun Kwon and Choi Goen; that’s followed at 6.15pm with conversation between the co-curators and exhibition designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin from FormaFantasma.

To 30 June.

Above: Byungjun Kwon, Dancing Ladders (2022)