Infiltrators seeks to rewire the circuits of our shared environment by summoning bodies that use or refuse, intervene in or parasite upon, and at times contaminate and transform the city’s infrastructures. The exhibition gathers five young artists—often labeled “emerging,” yet weighed down by inherited contracts shaped by long histories and conflicting interests. Working across moving image, sound, drawing, and installation, they look at their surroundings askew and respond with unproductive gestures and oblique languages, resisting—or at times embracing—a world that seems already predetermined. In doing so, they trace the unstable positions their generation is granted—or denied—through abjected sensations and the uncanny movements of human–nonhuman–thing assemblages.

Bodies marginalized along axes of gender, race, and disability may formally hold the right to enter public space and use shared resources, yet they are still tacitly cast as trespassers whenever a particular kind of body is presumed to be the “natural” occupant. If bodies and spaces are bound so insistently, then what is called a space “open to all” is, in effect, a space reserved for the so-called universal human. It is the infiltrators—at once insiders and outsiders, what Nirmal Puwar has named “space invaders”—who must become the starting point for reflecting on our environments.[1] At the same time, the younger generation in metropolises is rarely considered marginalized. They are cast as the protagonists of society’s future, celebrated as its most mobile and adaptable population. Yet once reduced to a single homogeneous group, their intersecting identities and differences erased, they too are caught in a double bind: marked as the very fuel of the city—agents of both consumption and production—while denied stable housing and working conditions. 

The infiltrators in this exhibition embrace—rather than resolve—the ambivalence of being both central and peripheral, insiders and outsiders. They trace small and large malfunctions across the city’s seemingly seamless surfaces. When infrastructures designed for the convenience of “everyone” betray us, infiltrators do not step in to repair them. Instead, they claim and reconfigure bodies that fall outside the norm. Confronting infrastructural breakdowns, they refuse the fantasy of infinite progress and seize failure as a chance for generative practice.[2]

This process may even look like an acceleration of failure: yielding the body to machines within systems that instrumentalize humans; taking the organic body as measure rather than standardized dimensions; moving through precarious conditions with a capricious, wayward rhythm; willfully misreading how common apparatus operate; supporting one another’s bodies however unaligned. Such gestures, at least provisionally, become tactics. Across histories and cultural contexts, acts of claiming a place of one’s own have taken similar forms: lying down or sitting to obstruct passage rather than standing upright, or appropriating facilities against their prescribed use. These uses of the body inscribe their own messages directly into space.[3]

Established in 2020 by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young (SAPY) is an infrastructure of physical spaces and support programs designed to foster young artistic practices. At its entrance is a shared office—an increasingly rare open space in the city where one can occupy a seat without having to buy anything. This exhibition temporarily occupies the White Gallery adjoining this office, engaging actively with its given conditions while minimizing intervention. It preserves the traces of the lounge that the gallery once was, the foldable partition walls devised to accommodate multiple uses, and the corridor function that connects to the meeting rooms, without introducing additional structures or furnishings. Infiltrators accepts the condition of occupying, only for a limited time, a space that is neither white cube nor black box—while refusing to let down its guard.

[1]  Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, trans. Kim Mideok (Seoul: Hyunsil Munhwa, 2004/2017), 23.
[2]  Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022, 21.
[3]  Hyunkyung Kim, Saram, Jangso, Hwandae [Person, Place, Hospitality] (Seoul: Moonji Publications, 2015), 285.