Publication project
COULD BE is a non-periodical publication series of SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016. It was conceived, along with the exhibition and two summer camps, as interdependent components of the Biennale. Mainly presented in the form of writing, the COULD BE issues magnify particular nodes of the Biennale’s ideas, and branch out through the approach of the invited editors.
After holding the Open Editorial Meeting in November 2015, the four editors each devised their issues as independent volumes. The four issues are published before the opening of the exhibition in September 2016, separately in Korean and English, and distributed by more than 15 independent bookshops and art spaces in Korea. The online editions will be featured on the Mediacity Seoul website from the first week of July 2016. During the exhibition period, the publications will be reconfigured into the COULD BE reading area in Seoul Museum of Art Seosomun and also a sequence of public programs, which will articulate the formations and omissions of COULD BE.
The guest editors of COULD BE are Yekyung Kil (Korea, editor and translator), Keiko Sei (Thailand/Myanmar/Japan, writer and curator), Chimurenga (South Africa, publishing and exhibition project team), and Miguel A. López (Costa Rica/Peru, writer and curator). Moon Jung Jang (US/Korea, graphic designer) also collaborates as an art director and design advisor.
Curated by Beck Jee-sook, the title of SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016 is NERIRI KIRURU HARARA, and the exhibition will take place from September 1 through November 20, 2016, in all three branches of Seoul Museum of Art.
COULD BE issues
No.1: Trios of Guides (published in April 2016)
Focusing on the noteworthy changes in the ways in which artwork or practice is made, shown, and viewed in Korea that rose to surface in the year 2015, Trios of Guides invites as writers those who participated or witnessed these changes. The participants, forming four guide groups of three, experiment with a mode of collective art writing in order to provide access points to the changed artistic culture in Korea.
–Edited by Yekyung Kil
–Contributors: Jeamin Cha, Hokeypokey, Seewon Hyun, Juyoung Jung, Kim Yeongsu, Helen Ku, Park Hyun-jung, Ji-Hyun Park, In-ah Shin, Woo Ahreum, Yoongky, Yoon Hyangro, Wonhwa Yoon
No.2: High School Special (published in May 2016)
High School Special is envisaged as a contribution from the art community to high school students. Preceded by the editor’s letter addressed to the students, this volume contains the summarized discussion among five Korean high school students during the making of their own “textbook,” with excerpts from news clippings, manga, theatre script, non-fiction book, online comments, and novel that were either given to or proposed by the students as source materials.
–Edited by Keiko Sei
–Contributors: Yurim Do, Yohan Joo, Dahyang Oh, Junghye Park, Keiko Sei, Jiyun Sun
No.3 (upcoming, to be published in August 2016)
This contribution takes the form of a special edition of Chimurenga’s quarterly pan African gazette, the Chronic, which presents new sci-fi graphic writing from Africa and its diaspora.
–Edited by Chimurenga
–Contributors: Hassan Blassim, Phoebe Boswell, Harmony Holiday, Nikhil Singh, Magdy El Shafee, Breeze Yoko, Native Maqari, among others
No.4 (upcoming, to be published in August 2016)
The last issue considers feminisms and queer politics as forms of a radical, unstoppable language that foresees the future, and helps us articulate what was impossible to say before.
–Edited by Miguel A. López
–Contributors: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Carlos Motta, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Jabulani Pereira, among others
