Exhibition Information

			ARKO Art Center of the Arts Council Korea will host a special exhibition, Path of Contact, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its opening in 2024. This special exhibition will consist of an art exhibition in the main building of the Center, together with an archive section. The exhibition chose to highlight the construction of networks as a key element, as it is one of the essential functions of museums. The Center intended to relinquish the authority to select artists and instead propose a museum that would serve as a hub in a constellation of interconnected individuals who have worked with the Center to foster further collaboration and expand their collective work. For this purpose, ARKO Art Center selected the artists to be invited from among those who had participated in the Center's exhibitions and asked them to recommend artists of different generations with whom they would like to collaborate. The participating artists consisted of the final nine groups, in which the artists in their teams had different relationships with each other, ranging from those who had been interested in the work but had never met in person, to those who had known each other for years as juniors and seniors but had never interacted with the work. Centered around the new work that each artist is currently focusing on, the themes also reveal different formal and substantive aspects of contemporary art, engaging with the art form itself, exploring community and historical events, or projecting a dystopian future. This leads to the exploration of issues in the contemporary art scene that arise from the encounter between artists of different generations.
Meanwhile, with the section that consists in the result of the participating artists’ collaboration, the exhibition will feature the posthumous published and unpublished works of three late artists who have made significant contributions to the Center's exhibition history, providing an opportunity to further explore the work of the artists whom the Center has highlighted. The archive section, located in the ARKO Open Space, contains approximately 200 archival materials, mainly thematic exhibition materials. These materials include brochures, pamphlets, photographs, and videos that document the history of the Center, providing a glimpse into the past and helping to envision the future direction of the Center.
The Korean title of the exhibition, Path of Contact is a quotation from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) by Gilles Deleuze, which is applied in the broad sense that the fold, which has the property of a multiplicity produced from various traces and contacts, creates the present of the historical product made of multifarious traces imprinted in the Center and opens the door for future contacts. That is, our present is the result of the trajectory and path of contacts, and the exhibition focuses on the kind of contacts that will shape the future of the Center. To this end, in the archive section, the Center recalls the role of the museum as a creative center for the discovery and rediscovery of artists and experimental works and examines the methodology of artistic creation that is formed by the expansion of relationships through the results of contact trajectories between artists revealed in exhibitions spanning 50 years, and pays attention to the role of ARKO Art Center as a platform for exchange.

(Source = ARKO Art Center of the Arts Council Korea)