The Daegu Art Museum is holding the Daegu Forum III, Whose Forest, Whose World, in 2024. The Daegu Forum is a theme-discovery curatorial exhibition started in 2021 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the museum’s opening and for the coming new decade. The current Daegu Forum exhibition was curated to reflect on anthropocentric narratives and awaken a new ecological sensibility through diverse contemporary artworks by artists in Korea and abroad about the crisis of the environment and ecology. 

Along with the rise of the Anthropocene discourse, the crisis of the climate and ecology is globally the most controversial and important subject humanity and the world faces. In 2000, the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer present the Anthropocene concept, referring to a new era created as humanity changed the Earth’s climate and ecology. While inviting academic debates including those of the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, and neo-materialism through several scholars along with the indication that it diverts to all the world’s people the blame for causing, and the responsibility to deal with, the Earth’s changes; the Anthropocene concept has, above all, caused us to face the various relationships and issues humanity had thus far overlooked in the Earth-environment issue. Along with the recent global pandemic, such a tide roused social awareness regarding the environment and turned the “eco-” thesis into a trend, but this, too, is still being consumed in the neo-capitalist system fulfilling human desires. 

Whose Forest, Whose World is an occasion for reflecting on the entities, sights, and times we objectified and marginalized for narratives in which people centrally feature on the small planet of Earth. In this exhibition, we will slowly examine, inside and out, today’s nature, nonhuman entities, and scenery in the growth of cities and civilization, which people have been developing. Through this, we ask whose forest and whose world the small but giant forest called the Earth we stand on is. 

The exhibition consists of the three sections of Flowers Do Not Bloom & Birds Do Not Chirp Even Though Spring Has Arrived, Forgotten Face, Patched World, and Belonging to the World, & Existing Together in the World; and the thirteen artists KANG Honggoo, KWON Hyewon, KIM Oksun, KIM Yujung, BEAK Jungki, SONG Sanghee, LI Setbyul, CHANG Hanna, CHUNG Zuyoung, JUNG Haejung, MINSUN, Anicka YI, and Tomás SARACENO are exhibiting. 

With this exhibition, we seek to prepare a place for being able to reflect on our present selves and nature, ultimately reset the future relationship between nature and humans in the Anthropocene and beyond, and discuss symbiosis. Further, we hope this will be a meaningful time in which viewers can share an ecological sensibility regarding nature, nonhumans, and the future through the artists’ works.