ART CITIES:Seoul-Gohyang:Home

Today, news reports on the disparate conflicts in Middle East and Arab world constantly remind us of the complexity of the region’s socio-historical background. South Korea experienced the current global refugee crisis beginning in 2018, with the arrival on Jeju Island of around 500 Yemeni citizens through the visa-free entry system. The South Korean public hastily leapt to fearful conclusions about these new arrivals, inspired by growing populist anti-refugee rhetoric abroad: fragments of impressions about strangers whom we will never know, although we may misunderstand what we do and do not know.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: SEMA Archive

The exhibition “gohyang:home” is the third edition of Seoul Museum of Art’s exhibition series “Approaching the Non-West”. The inaugural exhibition in 2015 focused on Africa, followed in 2017 by a focus on Latin America; in 2019, “gohyang: home” presents contemporary art from the Middle East and Arab world, a region in which memories persist of South Korean construction companies that developed buildings, roads, port facilities, power facilities and telecom infrastructures from the 1970s onward. The exhibition consists of four parts presented across two floors t. To begin, “Memorial Structure” deals with the specific conflict between Palestine and Israel as well as the present difficulties, through photographic documentary, archival image of personal memory, multimedia installation based on private experience and questions of our perceptions and beliefs toward conditions in the Arab world. The exhibition’s second part, “What Makes Us” examines how we register collective bonds from the dimension of ritual practice, understood as a measure of sentiment for a certain idealism that fulfills feelings of loss or lack evoked within the axis of grand time called history. As such, this ritualistic sense of connection could be seen as “an imagined value,” constructed afterwards out of yearning for something that never existed. “Storytelling as Silence” the exhibition’s third part, presents a series of narratives by different artists that assert a contemporaneity which manifests itself as a new origin of existence. The exhibition concludes with “(un)home” dealing with the experience of something that is strangely familiar, and offering the potential to go further into a hope or treatment for recovery from loss and dismay. Adel Abidin is a visual artist whose projects, whilst focused on global social, political, and cultural issues, traverse a complex landscape of identity, memory, exile, violence and war. Taking specific actions or objects out of their initial context he turns them on their head, creating ironic, darkly humorous and often absurdist responses, exploring issues such as cultural alienation and distorted realities. His video and sculptural installations often reference pop culture, racial stereotypes and traditional icons, designing tense situations of confrontation and dialogue that truly engage the viewer. Ahlam Shibli has always been interested in the living matter that is formed and transformed in inhabited areas. This matter transcends the divisions between private and public; it is a mosaic of gestures and places that includes “views” (landscapes), speech situations (elicited by the artist), and biographical documents (excerpted from family archives). Amer Shomali is a Palestinian artist and activist working in animation, illustration, and political cartoons. He holds a masters degree in animation from Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. Shomali uses art to interact with the social and political Palestinian context. His “Icon” (2011) uses 3,500 tubes of lipstick to reproduce the famous photo of Leila Khaled holding an AK-47, a statement about the commercialization of icons of the 1970s and 1980, Hazem Harb, always referring to his own Palestinian identity, takes a research-driven approach, moving beyond the limitations of verbal languge and photojournalism to create a physical representation of multi-faceted social issues. His collages examine the nuances and problems surrounding shifting borders, displacement and diaspora. Intelligent, philosophical, and visually impactful Harb’s creative process reflects the artist’s commitment to making a real connection with his collective past while resisting its systematic erasure. Jumana Emil Abboud works with drawing, installation, video and performance, exploring personal and collective memory, loss, longing and belonging. Inspired by the cultural landscape of her home, Abboud draws on the traditions of Palestinian folklore and myth-making by collecting stories and fairy tales. Investigating these story telling practices and oral histories, the artist provides new interpretations for the tales she has discovered. Rich in traditional and modern motifs of Eastern and Western art-historical references, Khadim Ali’s paintings tell stories about loss (of his own cultural heritage and of human values) and about how meaning shifts as words and images are perverted through ideological adoption. Ali’s recent work focuses on the relationship of Afghanistan to refugees who have relocated to his home country. Following the style of miniature painting, specifically that which uses the technique of neem rang (half-color), Ali employs traditional production methods. Mona Hatoum creates discomforting, challenging work that reveals the contradictions and uncertainties of our complex, confounding world. Using domestic and other familiar objects, Hatoum creates installations and sculptures that may simultaneously evoke fear and fascination, or beauty and revulsion, and that could hardly be more pertinent to our era of global migration and political uncertainty. Living and working in Alexandria, Wael Shawky has received international acclaim for his work as an artist and filmmaker, exploring transitional events in society, politics, culture and religion in the history of the Arab world. Shawky’s estrangement of narratives through the use of puppets, child actors and television-show formats, emphasize the power that historical and mythical narratives hold over the way we think about ourselves and the world.

Invited artists and contributors: Adel Abidin, Ahlam Shibli, Amer Shomali, Hazem Harb, Jinjoo Kim, Juman Emil Abboud, Khadim Ali, Minha Park, Mona Hatoum, Mounira Al Solh, Onejoon Che, Raed Ibrahim, Wael Shawky, ACC Film and Video Archive Collection, George M. Al Ama Collection and Khalid Shoman Video Collection (Darat al Funun).

Info: SeMA (Seoul Museum of Art), (Seosomun-dong) 61 Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, Duration: 27/11/19-8/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, http://sema.seoul.go.kr