Archived Memories

Foreword

Archived Memories is an exhibition presenting six works that are the outcomes of the “SeMA Bunker Archive Project,” which the Seoul Museum of Art carried out over five years starting in 2017. The “SeMA Bunker Archive Project” records the Yeouido Bunker—newly reborn as an art space for Seoul citizens—through the free interpretations of visual artists. It is a video production initiative aimed at transforming the bunker into a sustained site of cultural production. Using the History Gallery inside the SeMA Bunker as its base, the Seoul Museum of Art commissioned video works from artists Kwon Hyewon, Kim Daum, Son Gwangju, Shin Jiseon, Yoon Jiwon, and Lee Jeongwoo in order to construct the bunker’s identity. Over the course of six successive productions, each work moved beyond the meaning of an archive that merely seals off the past and came to function as an archive more like a warehouse that remains perpetually open toward the future. The video archive centered on the SeMA Bunker embodies a will to explore the place that goes beyond merely proving and reproducing historical facts.

The identity of the bunker, accidentally discovered in May 2005 during construction of the Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, has been established through a kind of circumstantial evidence. Lacking documentary records grounded in fact, the bunker acquires a variable identity depending on the perspective from which its political and social background is inferred. During the period it remained concealed, the bunker was in effect a “presence” that did not exist within the lives of Seoul’s citizens. Thus, for the artists, recording the placeness of a bunker in which reality and absence overlap was akin to redesigning an ambiguous space where precise facts and imagination are entangled.

In the conventional sense, an archive encompasses all work of recording and cataloguing that facilitates access to specific materials—in other words, a system for accumulating, organizing, storing, and managing scattered information. The six works presented in this exhibition reverse the existing concept of the archive in two directions. First, in capturing the bunker’s ambiguous reality, they stand at a remove from systems that organize existing information; instead, by projecting their individual gazes and artistic languages, they tend rather to disperse information about the bunker. At the same time, as each work accumulates within the “SeMA Bunker Archive Project,” they can be said to propose an archive that codes the bunker in the language of art. In this way, they meet audiences on the platform of Archived Memories and await the next archive.

“Recording memory” describes the five-year production process and the approach of the present exhibition that encompasses it. Unclear information about the bunker has been captured on video as it moves back and forth between record and memory. Furthermore, elements that slip away from the record, or circumstances that memory has omitted, also serve as key materials for the alternative and challenging historical narratives that are being activated in multiple directions in the contemporary era. Archived Memories seeks to understand and convey the artists’ artistic practices as an attitude that does not settle into the narrative structures of the times but adapts flexibly at every moment. In a contemporary society dominated by the rapid pace of change and an overwhelming volume of information, the more fluid the record, the farther it can be remembered. We hope that audiences who encounter the memories recorded by these six artists will embody this archival sensibility and imagine the future of the “SeMA Bunker Archive Project” in advance.