The largest manifestation of SMB12’s exhibition and programs takes place at SeMA’s Seosomun Main Branch. Spanning installation, time-based media, painting, sculpture, drawing, textile, wallpaper, and sound, the exhibition explores the global aesthetics of the non-territorial from physical and cultural displacements and replacements, to “unseen” infrastructures and media, to co-situated solidarities. Each gallery explores a different approach to non-territorial aesthetics, including artworks that make alternative maps, abstract history and identity, re-present displacement and migration paths, and communicate through cybernetic and indigenous positions. Along with the museum’s gallery spaces, its lobby, courtyard, hallways, rooftop, Project Gallery, and Crystal Gallery also present new and commissioned works as well as special events.

Seoul Museum of History is a popular destination for local and international visitors to Seoul who seek to better understand the city’s tumultuous growth and evolution. In the museum’s Special Exhibition Hall B, THIS TOO, IS A MAP presents 시, language for new moons, a survey exhibition by Jesse Chun, which demonstrates the artist’s longtime engagement with questions of language and power. Drawing from sustained connections to her own matrilineal history, Korean folk literature, and the country of her birth, Chun uncovers the “other side” of language, mapping its various cosmologies. In the context of the Seoul Museum of History, Chun’s works unfold new ways of seeing the histories and poetics that percolate through Seoul, arising from preservation, complexity, devotion, and reinvention.

Prior to opening to the public in 2017 as a satellite branch of SeMA, the underground gallery of SeMA Bunker is believed to have been built as a secret shelter during the military regime in the 1970s. Just as THIS TOO, IS A MAP engages with underground, historical, political, and cultural infrastructures of extraction and displacement, the works on view at SeMA Bunker investigate the links between human, technological and mineral displacement. This presentation focuses on the mapping of physical underground ecologies through histories of extraction, pollution, and natural resources.

The underground passageways connecting the City Hall and Euljiro stations of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway, located between the Plaza Hotel and the Myeongdong Underground Shopping Center, are home to a sea of commercial spaces that sell souvenirs, street food, clothes, and K-pop merchandise. Among such vendors are space mm and Sogong Space, where SMB12 presents artworks by Hyunsun Jeon and Bo Wang, who engage with the politics and tensions that emerge from the blurred boundaries between public and private spaces, as well as between the virtual and real territories of everyday life.

The underground passageways connecting the City Hall and Euljiro stations of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway, located between the Plaza Hotel and the Myeongdong Underground Shopping Center, are home to a sea of commercial spaces that sell souvenirs, street food, clothes, and K-pop merchandise. Among such vendors are space mm and Sogong Space, where SMB12 presents artworks by Hyunsun Jeon and Bo Wang, who engage with the politics and tensions that emerge from the blurred boundaries between public and private spaces, as well as between the virtual and real territories of everyday life.

Seoullo Media Canvas is a giant media screen that is visible from Seoul’s elevated pedestrian walkway Seoullo 7017 and Manri-dong Square, destinations that attract individuals from surrounding residential communities into the city center. This venue frequently screens works by young and emerging artists on topics relevant to the future of the city. Every evening, SMB12 presents a brief hourly program of new and recent works by celebrated artists that connect with the themes of the Biennale.