15 Apr 2014

The Growing Manual at Seoul Museum of Art

The Growing Manual project is a collaboration between artists Hyemin Son and John Reardon. Part publication, part artefact, part growing experiment and part architecture the project involves working with artist collectives and communities around the world to produce moments of encounter across the life of the project that says something about how artists are gathering together and working with current social, economic and political conditions.

In this first exhibition of the Growing Manual project various kinds of material – individually and collectively produced – are brought together in the space of the museum around three themes: matter, utopia and collectives in order to make a loose series of connections between ideas, images and circumstances. The aim is to describe a circumference within which the exhibition can be considered. The principal image of the dream is the enabling capillary tissue across these connections, between the exterior world of facts and the interior world of emotions, between reality and the imagination. These indirect, glancing narratives and descriptions tug in different directions. What results, however, is a sense of the diversity and range of work that comes together - for now - under the sign of the Growing Manual, through working with the interdependencies of cyber, geographic, and logical infrastructure, material, opportunity and chance encounter…