CICA Museum invites artists who are based in Korea and Korean Artists who resides in different countries to participate in NEWBODIES/NOBODIES. The exhibition is a group show and cultural exchange between faculty and staff of the department of Visual and Performing Arts at Montgomery College in Maryland, USA and artists from CICA Museum in South Korea. Selected Korea-based artists will participate in the show at King Street Gallery, Montgomery College, USA.

The event is co-curated by CICA’s Art Director Dr. Leejin Kim and MC Department Chair Dr. Norberto  Gomez, Jr.

Theme:

Even prior to the pandemic of 2020, human civilization had become increasingly tethered to the Network, a condition of perpetual digital/remote/virtual connection, carrying smartphones on bodies as a kind of latent cyborgism, and immersing in representations and performativity of self via social media networks, among others.  

While day to day social interaction, business, and politics blur the boundaries between offline and online experience, creating a global, extended telepresence, the media has also proliferated video clips, captured by smartphone users, of the murder of POC, including Eric Garner, for one, who’s “I can’t breathe” would cause a wave of protest over the right of a physical body, of a person, to exist. His last moments were broadcast and shared, by the general public, throughout the world. Meanwhile, during the early wave of the pandemic, overwhelmed nurses held up smart phones so one could say a final goodbye to their sick loved ones who were unable to breathe.

They experienced their final breaths through the medium of a smartphone, while news media chyrons kept up a death count. The smartphone acted as a medium communicating between life and death, where before there was a physical spiritual guide or teacher. Both are instances of the complex interaction and relationship between the body, technology, and mortality.

In the Age of Pandemic and Network, the body is potentially resurrected, reconsidered, and/or reconstructed. Newbodies/Nobodies features work that attempts to explore and critique a new figuration, a new body (virtual, cyborg, queer), body-politic, or a no-body (nobody), cyberspace, and transhumanism; life and death and the in-between; as well as the broader animal body and the natural/unnatural world(s) during this long-COVID/Network Condition.

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For more information or to apply, click here.