Installation view © Boan1942

A world in which everyone believes they can reach one another, speak freely, and choose anything. Distributed under the name of “freedom,” this sensibility incessantly injects images of infinite possibility, until the sense of choosing, speaking, and connecting becomes an indispensable premise. We enjoy freedom without recognizing that, within this premise, we are moving along predetermined trajectories.

Yet freedom has always been permitted only within specific structures, and those structures have become more intricate by erasing themselves from view. Freedom has ceased to be the right to choose and has instead become the compulsion to constantly choose. Autonomy has shifted from deviation from form to disciplined performance. Thus, autonomy becomes a calculable variable, and individuality is arranged into preferences selected by algorithms.

The optimized individual repeatedly responds to an invisible system, and even reflections on multiple crises are consumed within standardized frameworks. Within such constraints, the coexistence of diverse beings and realms loses its ground, and “species” are reorganized into new classifications under the flow of capital. Within landscapes of surveillance and standardization, conquest is no longer an event but infiltrates daily life as a way of subtly guiding choices and designing behaviors.

《I AM CONQUERED》 does not call conquest into the past tense; instead, it functions as a rehearsal preparing for the possibility of imminent conquest. Through an omnibus format, Sora Park, Wooju Jang, and Seohee Jeong each unfold their perspectives on the technological discourse traversing individuals and society, and the sensibilities of the post-conquest condition.

To recognize and confront these structures of conquest is not merely to face reality but to witness the moment in which suppressed possibilities for subversion emerge in the form of questions—questions that attempt to recall long-standing ideals within the still-operating order.

References