Installation view © Gyeongnam Art Museum

《Dreaming of Terrapolis》 is an exhibition that asks what roles art and museums can play—socially and ethically—in an age of climate crisis. As heat waves, floods, and mega-wildfires become part of daily life, the Gyeongnam region likewise feels the severity of this crisis. In particular, the record-breaking downpours that struck the areas of Changwon and Gimhae in September 2024 made clear that natural disasters are not merely environmental issues but profound matters that shake our lives and social systems as a whole. Based on this awareness, the exhibition seeks ways to sense and practice a world in which diverse life-forms and materials live entangled with one another, beyond human-centered thinking.

The title “Terrapolis,” proposed by science philosopher Donna Haraway, combines “Terra” (earth, land) and “Polis” (community, way of life). Terrapolis indicates an ecological community where not only humans but also animals, plants, and things coexist in relationality without a fixed center. Haraway’s SF—Speculative Fabulation—ethos, that is, an attitude of asking and imagining rather than seeking fixed answers, serves as the conceptual frame guiding this exhibition.


Installation view © Gyeongnam Art Museum

The exhibition approaches climate crisis not as a grand, global discourse but from a micro-perspective grounded in everyday life and lived places. Visitors are not mere viewers; they become co-creators and practitioners who ask questions, forge relations, and experiment with the possibilities of small change. Each participating artist articulates this problem-consciousness differently. Ikki Bawi Goorruru discovers abandoned Mireuks (Buddhist guardian stones) left by rice paddies, at village entrances, or beside dumps, and—by imagining their missing hands—explores possibilities of new relations in incompleteness.

Park Hyungreol captures nature with thread and fabric and carves earth in performative acts that visualize the human desire to control and possess nature, asking, “Can nature be owned at all?” Diana Band invites audiences into conversations among things through sound and movement, questioning human-centered communication structures and reminding us that all existences are entangled. Bae Yoon Hwan allegorically reveals issues of contemporary society and ecological environments by reinterpreting anthropomorphized animal characters and symbolic scenes from canonical painting; the animals in his works appear not as merely cute and familiar, but as subjects reflecting social and political realities. Weekend Lab reimagines ancient totemic concepts for the current ecological crisis, proposing the possibility of overturning existing value systems and transforming our sensoria as once-insignificant materials become a sculptural center.

Plastic Noriter links climate crisis to everyday life through workshops and exhibition projects that actively adopt a living-lab approach. Sunjeong Hwang combines the growth processes of mycelium with digital technologies to imagine new relationships between human and non-human life-forms, experimenting with ecological symbiosis and expanded perception.

《Dreaming of Terrapolis》 aspires to become a public laboratory—an open ecological network in which artworks, visitors, region, and environment are mutually entangled and responsive. Within this lab, we face questions such as: “How might we move beyond human-centered thinking to sense and practice a world lived with diverse beings?” and “How can art contribute to such a shift in thought?” The exhibition aims to become a forum in which we collectively sense and imagine a future of living-together through those questions.

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