busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but The World

Period

Saturday, December 14, 2024 ~ Sunday, February 16, 2025

Venue

Gallery 1(B1)

Artists

DIS

Media

Single channel video, picture

Curator

Taein Kim

내용

busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but the World exhibition view

©busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but the World, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, 2024 (photograph: Kang Sindae)

(Left) DIS, Damn, I look cute tonight, 2023

Giclée print on cotton rag, pen on Post-It notes, burnt walnut frame, 146 × 112 × 7.5 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London

(Right) DIS, Move the target, 2023

Giclée print on cotton rag, pen on Post-It notes, burnt walnut frame, 146 × 112 × 7.5 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London

©busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but the World, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, 2024 (photograph: Kang Sindae)

DIS, Everything but the World, 2021, Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 37mins 50secs., ed. 1/3(A.P.2), Busan MoCA Collection

©busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but the World, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, 2024 (photograph: Kang Sindae)

DIS is an artist collective formed in 2010 in response to the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and recession. Their work aims to critically address the absurd social structures of a techno-capitalist world, spanning various fields such as art, curation, critical theory, advertising, fashion, markets, and technology. Their projects, encompassing the artistic, commercial, educational, and public domains, involve embracing and producing new media and media platforms as a means to create and distribute art and foster critical discourse.

  Sci-fi documentary Everything But the World describes, non-linearly, the natural history of the human species, Homo sapiens, from a trans-apocalyptic perspective, critically reflecting on human existence and the world from a new angle. Apocalyptic signs throughout the work evoke the grim contemporary sentiment that, rather than believing the world can change, people feel it is already doomed or might end at any moment This doomsday view implies that the structure and values of our society are fundamentally shifting due to the acceleration and expansion of extreme capitalism and the intertwined complexities of electronic, technological, environmental, and political forces.

  Everything But the World traverses the grand history of human civilization, from prehistoric times to agrarian societies, the medieval period, imperial colonialism, and the Industrial and Technological Revolutions. The piece portrays how the concepts of property and progress are collapsing in modern society; examining the central roles of oppression and domination for capital accumulation. But the story presents a series of fragmented narratives in episodic form: exploring a podcast host who points out that humans are ultimately just one of the myriad fragile species residing briefly on planet Earth, and could be seen as the most unnatural of all products of nature; a YouTuber, the protagonist, presents a tutorial titled How to Become a Fossil; a rights lawyer explains the “castle doctrine,” justifying unlimited use of force under the guise of home defense; a tour guide at the medieval Castle expounds on the history of class struggle and division among colonized groups; and a drive-thru worker delivers a speech on existential inequality, suffering from chronophobia. The line between real and fake, truth and fiction, becomes hard to discern. This approach to narrative composition and visualization reflects our contemporary habits of media consumption and the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction in today’s world.

     Everything But the World reimagines a scenario focused on surviving the end. This work gives rise to a new narrative about the origins of human society by challenging the Western modern Enlightenment ontology, linear time, universal history, and concepts of knowledge. Progress is not a story of evolution connecting the past, present, and future, but a story of change and revolution marked by moments of recovery. In other words, time itself is a political challenge.

busan MoCA Collection_DIS: Everything but The World Leaflet Download