Direct from Antartica and the Arctic to Incheon Airport
전시기간 : 2023년 7월 26일(수) ~ 11월 30일(목)
* 여행성수기 및 KIAF-Frieze(9월) 연계 추진
전시장소 : 제2여객터미널 A/S 내 전시공간(254 게이트 인근)
참여작가 : 김승영, 조광희, 김세진, 염지혜, 손광주, 이정화, 홍기원
큐레이터 : 김효정
주최 : 극지연구소, 한국문화예술위원회, 인천국제공항공사
후원 : 해양수산부, 문화체육관광부
Foreword
Works by artists from Antarctica and the Arctic have arrived. Stories carrying the gazes of Kim Seung-young, Jo Kwang-hee, Kim Se-jin, and Yeom Ji-hye—who set out from the King Sejong Station in Antarctica—and of Son Kwang-Ju, Lee Jeong-hwa, and Hong Ki-won—who traveled the Arctic Ocean aboard Korea’s first icebreaker, the Araon—have reached Incheon Airport. Since 2011, the Arts Council Korea and the Korea Polar Research Institute have jointly run an annual polar residency program that dispatches artists from diverse fields, including visual arts, literature, children’s literature, and webtoons, to Antarctica and the Arctic. Over twelve years, twenty-three artists have participated; this exhibition presents works by seven of them who work in media and installation.
Airports and the polar regions in fact share many similarities. Antarctica and the Arctic, used purely for scientific purposes, and the departure halls of airports, which people enter only to leave the country or to transit, are spaces without a specific nationality. Both are also places where one stays only temporarily. Artists remain in the polar regions for at most about two months; the wintering crews at Antarctic and Arctic research stations stay for a year; passengers linger in departure halls for a day or two at most. What, then, did the artists who voluntarily chose to sojourn briefly in the peculiar environment of the polar regions—spaces devoid of any fixed nationality—discover and witness?
The landscape unfolding before us from this moment is the summer of Antarctica and the Arctic. Though it is called summer, it differs greatly from our own, yet it is gradually growing warmer. The artists who traveled to the poles witnessed that even human beings as tiny as dust particles are agents of change in the polar landscape. Places everyone knows of but few can reach—borrowing the eyes of artists, what might the polar regions be saying to us? Through the works, we can listen to the voice of nature.
— Kim Hyo-jeong, Independent Curator