The Ilmin Museum of Art (Director, Kim Taeryeong) will be hosting Animism, an exhibition that brings together a diverse body of work by international artists from the early twentieth century together with the museum’s own research archive. The show includes over 50 pieces by a total of 37 artists and teams from around the world whose work inspires the humanistic imagination to to re-examine today’s modern condition through the concept of animism.
Animism, the belief that objects possess souls or agency, has been largely excluded or ignored by the rationality and reason that represent modern society; however, it is deeply embedded in our lives even today. This exhibition brings into focus the phenomena and discourse surrounding the concept of animism and suggests the possibility of a new narrative told from its perspective. The show offers works of art and archival materials dealing with a variety of subjects including nature and artifice; the construction of logic; systems of intelligence; and shamanism and faith. It seeks to re-examines the hidden side of the world of animism and provides an opportunity for reflecting on our contemporary condition.
Animism tries to break away from simply looking at animism as non-modern or non-Western; it goes beyond the restrictive conception of animism as the attribution of souls to inanimate objects to look at works of art, documentaries, and intellectual activities that encompass the understanding, expression, imagination, and discourse concerning this concept. To the extent that animism had been classified as pre-modern and primitive in the process of forming the modern rational agent, this exhibition’s curator Anselm Franke takes an alternative, self-aware approach to the subject. He views animism as a tool for delineating the boundaries of the “West” and a device for establishing a divide between the modernized West and the colonized other. The show additionally considers resistance to the destruction of indigenous culture in today’s society and a new politics based on an animistic worldview.
In the exhibition, Candida Höfer, a German photographer who creates work based on typological photographs, presents a series of works that deal with the laboratory and the museum. Also included are early twentieth-century experimental films by Len Lye, who has gone down in the history of visual culture as a pioneer of experimental film; and the 1929 The Skeleton Dance, a piece directed by father of animation Walt Disney. In his new work Parallel (2012) the most important living German film director and media artist, Harun Farocki, shows computer-generated landscapes and real landscapes side-by-side, referencing the boundaries between organisms, nature, and the virtual. A large-scale painting by Adam Avikainen fills one wall of the second floor exhibition hall; the artist created the piece during his three-month stay in South Korea.
Animism also features several works by Korean artists, including photographs by Park Chan-gyong, who works on the subject of the rise and fall of indigenous shamanistic faith after modernization; Jeju Prayer, (2012) by visual artist and film director Heungsoon Im; Under the Vein (2012), a video work by Donghee Koo; Sangdon Kim’s Mirror (2009), which shows the primal, wild nature and indigenousness in inverted Korean landscapes; and Kil Choshil’s Breath Taking (2012), which consists of a glass bottle imbued with the breath of a shaman and focuses on the unseen energy in art and incantations. Also included are photographic works by Hosang Park and Dongyeop Lee that had been shown in two Ilmin Visual Culture publication series, The Investigation of Things and See, Show and the Windows, and other works chosen during research. Other archival materials were selected from the Museum of Humanities and the Dong-A Ilbo archives.
*image (left)
Candida Höfer
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III, 2003
Courtesy of the artist Kunstlerin
© Candida Höfer, Köln, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012
