김승영 Seungyoung Kim (KR)
나쓰코 데즈카 Natsuko Tezuka (JP)
스라 폴라로이스카 Sra Polaroiska (SP)
안성석 Sungseok Ahn (KR)
우치유 Wu Chi-Yu (TW)
정운 Woon Zung (KR)
줄리앙 코와네 Julien Coignet (FR)
포토아우라 Fotoaura Institute of photography (TW)

The word that begins with ‘architecture’ implies certain things. The basic would be habitation and so many things can be derived from it: city, family, economy, development, politics, power, history, institution, civilization, etc. These are other names of what is constructed from architecture. Architecture is closely related to the human will to construct ideologies and perspectives of the time in a realistic way. Thus, architecture is fundamentally a social outcome and historic construction. In this sense, this exhibition conceives architecture as a metaphor and approaches to the question of ‘how the today’s world is organized.’

“An attack to architecture is an attack to the human.” Bataille, 1929

By the time when modern architecture emerged, Bataille conveived architecture as a product of the social order and as an order of fear. However, this point of view received attention much later. The attention was started with Denis Hollier’s Against Architecture, which reinterprets the architectural metaphor as a metaphysical metaphor, and Karatani Gojin’s Architecture as Metaphor, which criticizes the ‘will to construct’ of the Western thoughts. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the critical thinking appeared and contemporary architecture was established as a typology. During the period, urban development and expansion were growing all over the world. The anti-architectural point of view is still a valid thesis in today’s society as it is a resistance and attack to the dominant order of the time.

Therefore, the exhibition examines problems related to today’s architecture from its periphery. Its subject matters range from the order and system of which the contemporary architecture is to the microscopic subjects’ situations and their way of countering to them. An investigation of these subject matters takes several paths, such as body, city, unconsciousness, feminism, the virtual, death, etc., by eight participating artists and teams inside and outside Korea. The works’ consideration on the non-body, abnormal behavior, ruins, trash, and the marginalized is an anti-architectural response to the question of how the world is organized. To conclude, there is no architecture in this exhibition. Instead, the exhibition provides the presences marginalized from architecture and the consequent situations as another constructive condition and tries to reach the falsity of the world hidden from the solid architecture. By doing so, it aims to question the human will that engenders the crisis of architecture and to open the possibility to think today’s architecture in a different way.