Installation view of 《The...Saver》 © AVP Lab

(God) Bless you!
 
During times when the plague raged, people immediately invoked God’s blessing upon those who sneezed, fearing that they might contract the epidemic or that their soul might escape their body. Yet in recent realities—where faith itself has sometimes been implicated as a source of pandemic spread—divine assistance feels impossibly distant.

Faced with a situation in which even science, the most blindly trusted belief since modernity, has proven powerless, one cannot help but exclaim, “Even God is indifferent!” If neither God nor vaccines can truly save us, to what, then, can we pray for salvation today?

Amid the present turmoil, marked by harsh betrayals of the blind faith placed in religion and science—systems that once sustained and prolonged human life from antiquity to the modern era—what role can art that resembles ritual possibly play? By reconsidering absolute beliefs that were once unquestioned, and by elevating whatever remnants of hope and mystery might still persist amid disaster, can art engender new possibilities of salvation?

Installation view of 《The...Saver》 © AVP Lab

The participating artists in this exhibition have examined symbols of worship and fear that span not only religious iconography and themes, but also human history, culture, and everyday life more broadly. Without being confined to any single religion, the works address belief systems ranging from folk faiths and legendary heroes to imagined disasters. These narratives enable a form of universal contemplation and appreciation, akin to the noble light filtering through the windows left behind in the former Palbok Church building.

The exhibition title, punctuated by three hesitant ellipses before the word “saver,” reveals existential anxiety triggered by distrust in an absolute being, while simultaneously prompting imagination toward the omitted words. If one feels that there is no one to whom anxiety can be entrusted, the three dots will remain a gesture of hesitation; yet for those who experience the sublime through perceptual and visual rupture, a new message of “life-” may be heard.

At the same time, the exhibition titled “…Saver” adopts a dual strategy that transcends the physical limits of reality, arriving simultaneously across digital “screens.” The enigmatic video—designed to protect a frozen computer screen from damage—plays unpredictably and without warning, generating sudden moments of wonder within everyday life.

Nearly three years have passed since unforeseen disasters destabilized existing value systems and belief structures. As our screens have become the primary sites of social activity, and as former places of worship persist as physical remnants, this exhibition embodies an artistic aspiration to interrogate blind faith and to search for renewed possibilities of salvation.

 
Text by Kim Yeji

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