The exhibition 《My Fellow Citizens》 began with a question about the contrasting reactions of Korean society toward Yemeni refugee applicants in 2018 and Afghan “special contributors” in 2021. The exhibition addresses the contradictory reality in which South Korea participates in conflicts in other countries while refusing to accept refugees. Works by Minha Park, Byungsu Lee, Yeoreum Jeong, and METASITU correspond to archival materials arranged by floor and are presented in the exhibition space as responses to national petitions related to South Korea’s Refugee Act.

My Fellow Citizens

Nara Lee

Image culture researcher. She studies contemporary aesthetic theory related to cinema, moving images, disaster imagery, and anthropological images, and writes critical texts on contemporary image-based practices. She is currently a research fellow at the Film Transmedia Research Institute at Dong-Eui University.

 
The Yemeni civil war, which erupted around 2014 and continues unresolved through 2022, is an internationalized internal conflict. Initially triggered by entangled political, religious, and ethnic tensions, the civil war later became a global war as international actors supplied weapons and troops. Shortages of basic necessities and outbreaks of disease—closely tied to blockade strategies led by the international community—have placed the Yemeni population under grave threat. According to international organizations in 2018, two-thirds of Yemen’s total population faced threats to survival. It was during this time that 484 Yemeni refugees knocked on South Korea’s door.

In response, an individual identifying as a South Korean citizen posted a national petition on the Blue House website, including the statement: “Please reconsider whether there is truly a reason for South Korea to accept refugees.” As a result, two opposing requests confronted one another: a request for refugee status and a request to deny refugee status. Are these two requests equally valid? Does a request for survival carry the same urgency as a request to more easily refuse survival?

The question “What is the reason South Korea should accept refugees?” is not, from the outset, a question seeking an answer. Rather, it is an interrogation¹—a linguistic violence that confirms exclusion through words and law, rendering existence invisible and nonexistent. Such verbal violence, which demands proof of existence, accepts no response. Ichiro Tomiyama points out the violence inherent in situations where exposure to investigative and identificatory language forces people into silence, emphasizing that before correcting the content of law, it is necessary to recognize the violence inherent in the fact that law itself is produced through interrogation and identification.

The exhibition 《My Fellow Citizens》(June 21–July 17, 2022, curated by Jooyoung Kang) does not stop at witnessing Korean society’s inability to practice hospitality. Rather, it seeks to reveal that Korean society is in fact part of a structure that produces refugees. In other words, while South Korea claims irrelevance to refugees as a reason for rejecting them, it is simultaneously one of the major suppliers of weapons to wars—the very machines that produce refugees.

Accordingly, the exhibition addresses themes of war and images of war, war and perception, and war and place. Images, perceptions, and places of war inevitably raise questions not only about the here-and-now of war, but also about temporal and spatial gaps that war renders perceptible. This is the problem of the gap between the here-and-now where war is occurring and the here-and-now believed to be outside of war, and the nature of our relationship to that gap.

The basement and second-floor exhibition spaces first expose South Korea through six archival materials related to refugee petitions and arms exports. These include documents concerning the abolition of visa-free entry and refugee application approval during the arrival of Yemeni refugees on Jeju Island in 2018; petition posts calling for constitutional revision; photographs of Hyundai Construction Equipment excavators used in the construction of Israeli Jewish settlements; records and press materials on arms exports and troop dispatches following visits by South Korean heads of state to the UAE. Together, these materials summarize South Korean society’s contradictory stance: collaborating with war, producing refugees, yet refusing them.

Video works by Minha Park (Double Mirror Treatise, 2019–2015; Strategic Operation – Hyperrealistic, 2015), Byungsu Lee (Vanishing Point of Descent, 2021), Yeoreum Jeong (To the Innate Witness, 2021), and METASITU (Tora Bora, 2016), exhibited alongside Korean, Israeli, and UAE archives, dissect in different ways the representations, operations, and legacies of ongoing wars, conflicts, and disasters—phenomena that are either too visible to be seen or impossible to grasp at a glance. To illuminate the spectacle of war, inseparable from what is made visible, is one way of illuminating refugees—beings who are generated within war yet remain thoroughly invisible.

The works of Byungsu Lee and Minha Park exhibited in the basement investigate the pairings of war and refugees, war and perception. Among these, Byungsu Lee’s Vanishing Point of Descent examines the empty interior of a missile silo—a subterranean launch facility designed for military purposes. The silo that Lee descends into with a camera is a structure built inland in the United States during the Cold War. As military demand for missile silos declined in the era of nuclear arms reduction, these facilities were sold into civilian ownership. They have since become “safe bunkers” marketed by private businesses as shelters from global catastrophe.

Combining live-action footage with graphic imagery, Lee’s missile silo video reveals a space in which the past of “total peace” (Paul Virilio)—a condition in which peace is achieved through the deterrence of nuclear weapons—and the present of “pure war,” neither fully war nor peace, overlap. Loud sound footage is layered onto the video and graphics, advertising shelters that promise survival even within apocalyptic narratives. Through this advertising noise, the uncanny simultaneity of optimistic possibilities of escape and apocalyptic impossibilities of escape becomes further accentuated.

According to Virilio, urban space imitates military structures, with the bunker as a prime example. While bunkers are commonly understood as defensive structures built to protect strategic terrain during war, Virilio argues the opposite: bunkers are not constructed in response to actual wars; rather, the act of building bunkers itself plans for military conflict. By constructing structures like bunkers, cities “preemptively” imagine artificial spaces of control endowed with military potential.

The privatized survival bunkers appearing in Vanishing Point of Descent operate under the same logic, materializing artificial spaces of control rather than materializing chaotic crises. Consequently, cities and societies structured according to the logic of war fear refugees, because refugees—who cross borders and deviate—introduce disorder into controlled spaces designed through military planning.

Passing Lee’s screen, we enter a room where Minha Park’s single-channel video Strategic Operation and three-channel video Double Mirror Treatise are installed. What first catches the eye is a simple set of archival materials revealing military collusion between the UAE and South Korea. Among them is promotional material for the UAE military cooperation unit “Akh Battalion,” titled “The Real Descendants of the Sun Have Appeared, Part Two!!” This title openly boasts war as a reality that imitates imitation—a simulacrum copying a reproduced reality.

Park has long addressed the persistent allure of illusion in works such as A Story of an Uncatchable Eye and Cosmic Kaleidoscope. The desert is a space in which the ambiguous relationship between reality and illusion—perceived through the act of seeing—comes fully to the fore, as the link between image and reality easily collapses there. Strategic Operation illustrates desert visuality through footage of screenless cinemas in the Egyptian desert and countercultural and science-fiction films set against desert backdrops.

At the same time, since the twentieth century, deserts have also been sites of intense geopolitical conflict. Traversing both the history of optics and the case of the Baghdad set in California’s Mojave Desert—used first as a war film set and later as a “real-time training” center for U.S. troops destined for Middle Eastern combat—Park exposes the politics of vision that develops optics according to the logic of weaponry, alongside the war-driven visuality that absorbs media as part of military training.

Serge Daney once wrote, upon the advent of televised live war broadcasts, that “we are no longer witnesses to the world, but witnesses to images of the world.”³ The Mojave Desert set produces a condition of tele-presence in which images arrive without the event of departure. Virilio recognized that tele-presence creates a gap between what lies within the scope of vision and what the body can actually do. Today, virtual presence goes further, offering the body even the “possibility” of a virtual body and activity. Real-time military training in the Mojave Desert exemplifies this phenomenon.

Double Mirror Treatise likens the Mojave Desert—imitating the Baghdad desert—to a doppelgänger phenomenon. Evoking the legend that encountering oneself where no mirror exists signals death, Park does not merely project endlessly proliferating illusory spaces but instead reconsiders the logic of the double mirror—much as the eleventh-century Iraqi optics scholar Ibn al-Haytham corrected misunderstandings about the trajectory of light.

Upon entering the second-floor exhibition space, visitors encounter printed materials related to the Refugee Act, visa-free entry, and petitions calling for the abolition of refugee application approvals and constitutional revision during the arrival of Yemeni refugees on Jeju Island. As they pass these materials and reach the screening room featuring works by METASITU and Yeoreum Jeong, a line from Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire echoes in the mind: “Showing you napalm victims would hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you would feel as though we had used napalm against you. We only show you a very reduced representation of napalm’s effects.”

The collective METASITU’s video work takes its title, Tora Bora, from a term used to describe the dust that accumulates on the skin and bodies of Palestinian laborers working in Palestinian quarries. The limestone—also known as “Jerusalem stone”—extracted, processed, and exported by these laborers has long materialized Israeli religious ideology, used to establish a state on Palestinian land and to push Palestinians into a colonial condition.

The quarry and stone-processing factory scenes composing Tora Bora do not present melancholic ruins or scenes of mourning; what we witness is the production of materials destined for the altar of the occupying force. In this sense, the quarry dust recalls the urban landscapes of Osaka and Yokohama in the films of Masao Adachi, who articulated the theory of landscape (Fûkeiron).

Passing photographs of Hyundai Construction Equipment excavators used in Israeli settlements and archival presidential speeches revealing aggressive sales ambitions toward the UAE, viewers arrive at the prolonged duration of Yeoreum Jeong’s video work To the Innate Witness, running eight hours and fifteen minutes. Like the works of Lee, Park, and METASITU, Jeong’s work is grounded in the contexts of war, conflict, and colonialism, and is mediated through questions of media. While Park explores war through the lens of perceptual imagery, Jeong approaches war through its relationship with media. This thematic concern was already prominent in her earlier works Graeae: A Stationed Idea and The Long Corridor.

In To the Innate Witness, the images Jeong endlessly collects—while remaining connected to the internet, that is, to the spatiotemporal field of conflict—are videos uploaded by Gaza civilians themselves as airstrikes unfold. One could readily speak of the significance of Jeong’s archiving practice, noting her attentiveness to the archive’s capacity to “unexpectedly open onto unknown worlds,” to offer “vivid preliminary sketches for reinterpretation,” and to release unforeseeable “reality effects.”⁴ Yet unlike her earlier works, in which she assembled clues about the operations of unmarked U.S. military bases, To the Innate Witness delivers the time of a disaster-stricken world directly before the eyes of witnesses who cannot avoid being witnesses within today’s media environment.

Does this work, by presenting unprocessed archives, seek to make contemporary viewers experience desire and suffering firsthand? The sounds of shells, darkness, flashes of light, crowds moving without certainty toward refuge, and images of Gaza in daylight fill videos lasting one hour and thirty minutes, or eight hours and fifteen minutes. Voiceovers—aftermaths or parables of violent societies—are woven into the images, often betraying their temporality.

More than the content of the archive itself, Jeong’s work seems to question the time spent mining and viewing archives: the time of action, the time of the body, and the emergence and unfolding of emotions and numbness that adhere to and eventually overtake the body. Rather than experiencing the time of disaster, we experience the time of the witness, observer, and spectator—where desire and ethics sharpen, shaped by anticipation and expectation.

This is the nature of the experience proposed by the exhibition 《My Fellow Citizens》: to experience a time of ethics without ethics, and to remember it as a time of conflict in which ethics must be reestablished from the ground up.


 
Notes

1. Ichiro Tomiyama uses the term “interrogation space” to describe spaces permeated by linguistic violence in which state institutions question and forcibly extract answers, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonialism. Ichiro Tomiyama, trans. Jung Myung-shim, Knowledge of Beginnings: Frantz Fanon’s Clinical Thought, Moonji Publishing, 2020.
2. Paul Virilio refers to the era following World War II—characterized by nuclear deterrence and generalized civilian anxiety—as the era of “total peace,” a term that also denotes total war disguised as peace. “Pure war” is closely linked to total peace but more directly connected to scientific development, referring to a state in which science and technology eliminate contingency and assume omnipotence. Paul Virilio, Défense populaire et luttes écologiques, Paris: Galilée, 1978; L’insécurité du territoire, Paris: Galilée, 1993.
3. Serge Daney, La maison cinéma et le monde-2. Les années Libé, 1981–1985, Paris: P.O.L, 2002.
4. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images Malgré tout, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003.

References

• 《과거가 영원히 현재로 오고 있다 (All the Past Comes to the Present)》)