, 
¡Ø Participaing Artist
Abraham CRUZVILLEGAS, Nayla DABAJI and Ziad BITAR, Alicia FRANKOVICH, Emil GOH, Jinyeoul JUNG and Changmo AHN, Yeondoo JUNG, Ash KEATING, KIM Beom, Jooyoung LEE, Minouk LIM, Listen to the City, Andrew MCQUALTER, Part-time Suite, Hyunsuk SEO, Haegue YANG, Jun YANG, Suyeon YUN and Jinyoung KOH
City Within the City acknowledges cities and urban areas as a prevalent way of life for a large portion of the world's population today. Approaching cities not as mere statistical entities, this exhibition examines the issues that arise from regarding them as agglomerations of people established over time. As such, they can be experienced as sites of reciprocal action between built environments - historically, geographically and administratively determined - where human subjectivities appear in constant physical, psychological and intellectual reconfiguration.
This first version of City Within the City presented at Artsonje Center, reflects Seoul's urban structure. The dynamic metropolis Seoul has become bears traces from the impact of industrialization, the devastation of the Korean War, reconstruction under postwar and Cold War regimes, and its emergence as a world presence due to economic growth. These complex factors influence the dynamics specific to the commercial and industrialized zones of Seoul. Increasingly contained within these governmentally and politically demarcated areas, what possibilities for creativity, transgression and resistance exist for the human body, imagination and memory?
City Within the City charts the remembered, fictional, expected and resisted cities as they are publicly and privately negotiated by the individual. Questioning the consequences of and presenting alternatives to formal governmental configurations of city development, several works in the exhibition provide resources and open platforms to reconsider urban spaces as increasingly active sites for creative investigation and transgression.
The works featuring in City Within the City adopt parallel and tangential ways to address different points of friction, misalignments, and moments open to re-imagining existing circumstances. Through this process, the exhibition offers itself as a site for widening the possibilities for engagement with the cities within our cities.
KIM Beom, Three Worlds (after Escher Chunggye Skyway 1/13/97. 5:00-5:20 a.m.)>1997, 1 channel video, 6¡¯ 35¡±, still image
Abraham CRUZVILLEGAS, Autoconstruccion:Resource room, 2010, Variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Installation View of City Within the City at Artsonje Center, 2011, Photo by Myungrae Park
Emil GOH, emilgoh/Emil Goh, 2006, 37 x 150 cm, photograph, from mycy series
Emil GOH, sullengirl/Lee KwangHo, 2005, 37 x 150 cm, photograph, from mycy series
Haegue YANG, Light House (Osram) Bewitched in Time, 2010, 7 x 70 x 48 cm, cardboard packaging for light bulbs, corraline, origami paper, ca. Photograph: Haegue Yang
Part-time Suite, SAMUSO Patch, 2011, multiple interventions, Installation View of City Within the City at SAMUSO, 2011-2012, Photo by Myungrae Park
Installation View of City Within the City at Artsonje Center, 2011-2012, Photo by Myungrae Park