Innerspacing the City

November 17 – December 10, 2011
Mezzanine Floor

Curated by Denise Carvalho, Ph.D.

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Innerspacing the City explores the ambivalence of experiencing city life in the performative body, within human relationships, and through language. This theme is examined through the work of seven young Korean artists and their perception of the utopian society as an abstract, distant, inaccessible entity that is beyond their control. Throughout the exhibition, the city is personalized, limited to their emotional and critical response to it. However, all of the ideals represented in their works share a duality: between Seoul and New York City, South and North, local and global, space and time – and between the past and future.

The exhibition uses the city as the focal point to explore the dialogue between reality and the ideal. Our perception of what we call “real” has gone a long way, from the Cartesian split between mind and body – overlooking the Kantian transcendental approach through reason – toward the phenomenological perception of space via the body in motion. This multi-faceted concept steers away from the idea that all is constructed in language, to finally return its focus on the collective body, which aims at losing subjectivity by gaining collective consciousness. The question remains: Is what we call “real,” or its lack-thereof, merely symbolic and ideological? Or is the “real” the fragmentary and the personal actions that allow us to dream with something beyond itself?