Doing Anthropology:
Are Humans We? 인류학 연습: 인간은 우리인가?KOR

The three pillars that have structured civilization — the natural environment, urban culture, and technological development — are now being fundamentally reconfigured through their entanglement with artificial intelligence, newly synthesized material environments, and previously overlooked non-human beings and planetary conditions. These transformations, accelerated by global turning points such as the pandemic and the climate crisis, signal not only the convergence of art and technology, but a more fundamental reconfiguration of the contemporary artistic landscape, in which each continually conditions and reshapes the other. Against this backdrop, the exhibition positions the artist not simply as a cultural producer, but as a practical actor exploring the technological, environmental, and social conditions of the present, or, in other words, anthropologists. They no longer confine themselves to observing external Others. Their field of inquiry now encompasses the alterity embedded within the self and community; non-human beings and planetary conditions that challenge anthropocentric ontologies; anthropomorphized technologies and proliferating artificial objects; as well as futures yet to arrive and temporalities that precede human experience.

The exhibition entitled Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We? brings together artistic research and technological collaborations developed since spring, creating a temporary site in which the complex landscapes of the human emerge. Each artist has developed a distinctive ethnography from audio-visual archives assembled through sensations, data, narratives, and technological mediations gathered from their own lives and environments. These artistic ethnographies serve not merely as modes of observation and documentation, but as contemporary analytical languages reconfigured within the technological conditions of artificial intelligence, interfaces, and data structures. They seek to renew our understanding of the world, ourselves, and what lies beyond established boundaries through some of the most fundamental human practices such as walking, following, speaking, listening, writing and erasing, and repetitive labor. In Korea, where ethnic homogeneity and socially consolidated systems of meaning exert considerable influence, such approaches turn attention inward rather than outward.

The exhibition therefore understands “the human” not as a fixed category but as a process continuously reconstructed through relationships with technology, environments, and a multiplicity of beings. Viewers are invited to reconsider their own positions within the experiences of others as they move among these multilayered records and narratives, and to reflect on the conditions of the present as they imagine the future. By entering the exhibition, we may briefly become contemporary anthropologists, observing our own lives and the world anew, and considering the distance between the community we call “we” and the universal category of “the human.” There, we retrace the trajectories and the position of various actors that have too often been overlooked, ultimately returning to the question of the human. Perhaps practicing anthropology is not a matter of moving endlessly toward the Other, but of encountering the human again, as something unfamiliar.