Layered Dialogues: We Are in Open Circuits

Layered Dialogues: We Are in Open Circuits is the first in a two-part publication series produced in parallel to the two exhibitions of contemporary art developed through an institutional collaboration between Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). Initiated in 2024, the long-term partnership was forged to connect the United Arab Emirates and South Korea through their artists, collections and curatorial visions. Taking its title from the Abu Dhabi exhibition Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits, this volume operates as both catalogue and critical dialogue, reflecting on art's role as a mediating force amid the rapid urban, technological and social transformations that have shaped South Korea from the 1960s to the present. It presents media-based practices from Korea across more than four decades, bringing together 48 works by 29 artists with full-colour reproductions, installation views, and detailed documentation, accompanied by essays, poetic readings and observations that speak to-and enter into dialogue with-the artworks as well as with the exhibition's curatorial statements. In this way, the publication, like the exhibition, explores how Korean artists have used evolving technologies to respond to social transformation. It charts the exhibition's three sections, each examining a different dimension of "medium," understood both as physical material and as a mode of communication. The first considers the body as our most immediate point of contact with the world; the second explores society as a network of stories, memories, and inherited knowledge; the final section turns to space-urban, natural, and digital-examining how environments are shaped by globalisation and layered histories.