10/09/2026
[Dew Kim - Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale]
PODIUM is delighted to share that Dew Kim’s (Dew Kim) ‘Legion, Nowhere Whole’ (2026) is currently on view at the Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale (재단법인 광주비엔날레 Gwangju Biennale Foundation). This iteration, themed ‘The Look is A Li(k)e’, is curated by Irene Campolmi (Irene Campolmi), produced by Valentia Buzzi (Valentina Buzzi | 발렌티나) and organised by the Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul (주한이탈리아문화원 🇮🇹🇰🇷 IIC Seoul).
In Legion, Nowhere Whole (2026), Dew Kim extends his investigation of the body as a site of resistance within contemporary systems of surveillance, digital control, and normative power. Echoing a Roman maxim, the title evokes a state of total dismemberment in which no part remains intact. It alludes to the collective experience of self-fragmentation produced by the proliferation of identities across social media and algorithmic networks, where selves are reduced to data, disassembled, and commodified for profit under the logic of capitalism.
Examining how identity and desire are disciplined, shaped, and consumed under technological, patriarchal, and gendered regimes of surveillance, Kim suggests that within such structures resistance lies not in escape but in dissolution into untraceable forms. The work takes the form of an anti-monument: a disembodied figure scattered into fragments whose original configuration appears impossible to reconstruct, transforming mechanisms of control into gestures of self-determination. Rather than depicting passive submission, the work reclaims disobedience as a deliberate aesthetic and political act, proposing resistance through subversion rather than evasion.
_
Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale
‘Legion, Nowhere Whole’
05 September 2026 - 14 February 2027
Image:
Installation view of ‘Legion, Nowhere Whole’, Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale, 2026.
Commissioned by the Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul, 2026.
Courtesy of the artist and PODIUM, Hong Kong.
Dew Kim
재단법인 광주비엔날레 Gwangju Biennale Foundation