DauLang is delighted to present, POWER CENTRE, a group exhibition featuring the work of five international artists.

Chinua Achebe’s famous resynthesis of WB Yeats’ epigram Things fall apart / The centre cannot hold is the most prominent framing of Yeats’ crisis of modernity. Achebe demands the west to perceive its own positionality in a colonial context. Yeats himself was of course thinking about Europe post ww1. It is a line that now disappears as refraction endlessly reinterpreted. Yet in a moment of ultra- acceleration towards a great planetary unravelling the words once again offer space to reconsider/reimagine the dynamics of global power.

These five divergent practices meet across various topographies of power – power slippery and undetected or power conspicuous and finely articulated – the terrorscape of an infinite internet and an unremitting circulation of images, the ambience of empire, the inherent frailty of identity and nationhood in a pressure chamber, the shakiness of subjectivity and agency in the body’s subjugation to bio political state power. 

As Seoul becomes recognised as a new centre of the global art eco-system, these five important international voices arrive to collectively work through myriad strands of power to make visible that which often operates in secret.