Minibus, Oort Cloud, Fluttering Pages, organized by three collaborative curators and featuring 28 artists, aspires to glance over the cultural legacy left by Insa Art Space (hereafter “IAS”) over its 25 years of existence. IAS, a space that the Arts Council Korea (hereafter “ARKO”) had provided as a means of supporting emerging artists, was indeed a subsidiary of ARKO, but it also had noninstitutional and alternative characteristics that gave it the singular position of being “extra-institutional, yet within the institutional framework.” Since its foundation in 2000, IAS has organized more than 350 exhibitions and projects and supported artists’ studio practices, art education, art journal publication, video media distribution, and residencies.
Among these diverse IAS initiatives, this exhibition is specifically focused on the following three: support for emerging artists, promotion of video media, and publishing of visual arts journals. Three curators who have come through ARKO’s curator incubating programs have drawn upon their own research and activities to organize three sub-exhibitions that each channel these three initiatives indirectly. Each exhibition, respectively, “sets disappearance as a condition to reconsider the identity assigned to IAS and the method of historical narration.” (Minibus, curated by Hyukgue Kwon), “contemplates the site of moving images through adjacent technological supports while taking into account the impossibility of operating a media archive within today’s technological environment” (Oort Cloud, curated by Shinjae Kim), and “showcases a publication that employs the vibrations and microhistories between art, space, and people to newly interweave the last days of IAS” (Fluttering Pages, curated by Dohee Kim).
The exhibition poster contains visual representations of the keywords that serve as the clues to each exhibition. For Minibus, its keywords include “lowercase, movement, stopover, route,” while Oort Cloud holds clues such as “scattered comet, signal, ice fragment, transportation of seeds,” and Fluttering Pages allows visitors to encounter the exhibition by imagining “diverse voices, the feeling of a book’s pages vibrating and moving gently and minutely as they are touched by one’s fingertips.” These keywords metaphorically represent the journey of IAS by pointing to the identities that the space constantly exemplified, such as the philosophy of the lowercase, respect for small voices, and the compensation for macro discourses. Furthermore, the image of seeds, suggesting conception, relates to the potential within IAS for sustained expansion, and the idea of the vibrato synchronizes rupture and exchange — two of the exhibition format’s methodological approaches.
IAS operated by the Arko Art Center long maintained its uniqueness as a space that welcomed diverse activities from young artists. The Wonseo-dong era of IAS ends this June, and while there are no plans for its next location, the legacy of IAS will continue to be summoned and gain new contexts through various future exhibitions and projects, just as in this exhibition. Spaces that function as a creative outlet, lounge, and salon for the emerging artists of an era will always come and go, responding to the specific demands and trends of their time. Taking the memories of IAS as their starting points, Minibus, Oort Cloud, and Fluttering Pages collect the space’s marks in the contemporary art world, and aspire to link them to the present and the future.
