November 9, 2011
17 August 2012–22 September 2012
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne
200 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065
Australia
Artsonje Center and Gertrude Contemporary announce their collaboration for the City Within the City exhibition to open November 11, 2011 in Seoul and August 17, 2012 in Melbourne.
City Within the City—presented in Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia, two of the world’s mosturbanized centres—seeks to uncover and interweave fictional, composite, fabricated and re-purposed narratives wherehuman subjectivity encounters the built environment.
City Within the City acknowledges cities and urban areas as a prevalent way of life for a large portion of theworld's population today. Approaching cities not as mere statistical entities, this exhibition examines the issues thatarise from regarding them as agglomerations of people established over time. As such, they can be experienced as sitesof reciprocal action between built environments—historically, geographically and administratively determined—wherehuman subjectivities appear in constant physical, psychological and intellectual reconfiguration.
This first version of City Within the City presented at Artsonje Center, reflects Seoul's urban structure. Thedynamic metropolis Seoul has become bears traces from the impact of industrialization, the devastation of the KoreanWar, reconstruction under postwar and Cold War regimes, and its emergence as a world presence due to economic growth.These complex factors influence the dynamics specific to the commercial and industrialized zones of Seoul. Increasinglycontained within these governmentally and politically demarcated areas, what possibilities for creativity, transgressionand resistance exist for the human body, imagination and memory?
City Within the City charts the remembered, fictional, expected and resisted cities as they are publicly andprivately negotiated by the individual. Questioning the consequences of and presenting alternatives to formalgovernmental configurations of city development, several works in the exhibition provide resources and open platforms toreconsider urban spaces as increasingly active sites for creative investigation and transgression.
The works featuring in City Within the City adopt parallel and tangential ways to address different points offriction, misalignments, and moments open to re-imagining existing circumstances. Through this process, the exhibitionoffers itself as a site for widening the possibilities for engagement with the cities within our cities.
ARTISTS
Abraham CRUZVILLEGAS, Nayla DABAJI and Ziad BITAR, Alicia FRANKOVICH, Emil GOH, Jinyeoul JUNG and Changmo AHN, YeondooJUNG, Ash KEATING, KIM Beom, Jooyoung LEE, Minouk LIM, Listen to the City, Andrew MCQUALTER, Part-time Suite, HyunsukSEO, Haegue YANG, Jun YANG, Suyeon YUN and Jinyoung KOH
CURATORIUM
Sunjung Kim, Claudia Pestana, Hyejin Lim (SAMUSO) with Alexie Glass-Kantor, Emily Cormack (Gertrude Contemporary)
