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

DIS, Everything But the World, 2021, Single channel HD video, color, sound, 3min 50sec

 

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. The work presents a series of fragmented narratives in episodic form, exploring the ontological significance of human existence and the meaning of the progress of human civilization within the vast historical transformations of capitalism.

　　It traverses the grand history of human civilization, from prehistoric times to agrarian societies, the medieval period, imperial colonialism, and the Industrial and Technological Revolutions. Through figures ranging from hunter-gatherers to nomads, peasants, city dwellers, witches, women, slaves, commoners, wage laborers, and from crawling on all fours to climbing mountains, running, twisting, stripping, gripping, standing to work, cutting, conveyor belts, and logistics centers, the piece portrays how the concepts of ownership and progress are collapsing in modern society; examining the central roles of class, slavery, coercion, surveillance, punishment, and the dynamics of power that have shaped the vast history of human civilization across time.

　　The entire narrative of the work is connected through a single voice, yet it weaves through various media and genres, including documentary, YouTube tutorial, podcast, and TV show. It moves fluidly across formats and screens, from standard-resolution squares to widescreen, and even the vertical iPhone screen ratio. This approach to narrative composition and visualization mirrors our current methods of producing and acquiring knowledge, and decoding new media languages, where advancements in technology allow access to all kinds of information without constraints of time and space, as media platforms have exponentially expanded. This strategy reflects our contemporary habits of media consumption and the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction in today’s world.

　　The cleverness of Everything But the World lies in tracing back the grand narrative of human existence as one of many possible stories, cautioning against the danger of its solidification as historical fact in the future. The work warns that if the “end of the world” is consumed mindlessly, human civilization will distort itself endlessly, ultimately leading to its collapse. Here, the notion of apocalypse is no different from the illusion of salvation; neither divine forces nor eons of time offer any guarantee of human progress. 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