The Ilmin Museum of Art (Director, Kim Taeryeong) will be hosting Animism, an exhibition that brings together a diverse body of work by international artists from the early twentieth century together with the museum’s own research archive. The show includes over 50 pieces by a total of 37 artists and teams from around the world whose work inspires the humanistic imagination to to re-examine today’s modern condition through the concept of animism.

Animism, the belief that objects possess souls or agency, has been largely excluded or ignored by the rationality and reason that represent modern society; however, it is deeply embedded in our lives even today. This exhibition brings into focus the phenomena and discourse surrounding the concept of animism and suggests the possibility of a new narrative told from its perspective. The show offers works of art and archival materials dealing with a variety of subjects including nature and artifice; the construction of logic; systems of intelligence; and shamanism and faith. It seeks to re-examines the hidden side of the world of animism and provides an opportunity for reflecting on our contemporary condition.

Animism tries to break away from simply looking at animism as non-modern or non-Western; it goes beyond the restrictive conception of animism as the attribution of souls to inanimate objects to look at works of art, documentaries, and intellectual activities that encompass the understanding, expression, imagination, and discourse concerning this concept. To the extent that animism had been classified as pre-modern and primitive in the process of forming the modern rational agent, this exhibition’s curator Anselm Franke takes an alternative, self-aware approach to the subject. He views animism as a tool for delineating the boundaries of the “West” and a device for establishing a divide between the modernized West and the colonized other. The show additionally considers resistance to the destruction of indigenous culture in today’s society and a new politics based on an animistic worldview.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19910