Join Sophie Yeonhee Kim at “Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We?”
Sophie Yeonhee Kim, lecturer in political science and international relations at the Underwood International College, Yonsei University, and the artist Ban Jaeha are hosting a session “In anticipation of the satellites” on 18 September 2026 (Friday) at 18:00.
The session is part of an exhibition “Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We?” running from 1 September to 20 September 2025, 12:00 – 20:00.
Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We? 인류학 연습: 인간은 우리인가?
Anthropology began as a discipline for understanding the unfamiliar Other. Its main method, ethnography, was developed in the West in the age of imperialism to study non-Western peoples. Today, both anthropology and ethnography are undergoing a fundamental transformation. If the question of the last century “What is a human?” was based on the definition of the human being grounded in evolutionary biology and the social sciences, then today’s question “Are humans we?” challenges that very premise and prompts us to reconsider the boundaries of “us” and the conditions under which such questions are formed. Contemporary artists expand the field of study to include themselves, their communities, nonhuman beings, and even future imagination. In doing so, they actively adopt anthropological methods of observing, recoding, and, at times, participating in the lives of a community within the geopolitical context of a specific time and space. The three pillars that have shaped civilization—natural environment, urban culture, and technological development—are now being reorganized into a new order as they become entangled with artificial intelligence, newly synthesized material environments, and previously invisible nonhuman beings and planetary conditions. This global turning point was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, accelerating the change even further. In response, there is a fundamental shift in the contemporary arts prompting artists to move beyond the simple fusion of art and technology. Therefore, this exhibition positions artists not merely as cultural producers, but as practical agents who explore technological, environmental, and social conditions—in other words, as anthropologists of our time.
Doing Anthropology: Are Humans Us? Brings together art, research, and technology accumulated through meetings and workshops over time in which artists constructed their own ethno-geography based on the audiovisual archive of senses, data, narratives, and technologies from their lives and surroundings. These newly created artistic ethnographic sites function as a contemporary analytical language beyond mere observation and documentation. On the one hand, they traverse artificial intelligence technologies and interfaces, data structures, and networks. On the other, through such basic and repetitive human acts as walking, speaking, listening, and writing, they renew the understanding of the world and the realm beyond. In the Korean society, characterized by ethnic homogeneity and fixed social structures, this approach aims to re-examine the interior of “we.”
The exhibition views the category of “human” today not as a fixed definition, but as a process of constant reconstruction within the context of technology, environment, and relationships with diverse beings. The audience moves between the multilayered records and narratives, questioning their own place within another’s experience, and rethinking the conditions of the present through the process of imagining the future. All of us who join the exhibition will, for a moment, become anthropologists of our time, re-examining our lives and the world around us, and measuring the distance between the community called “we” and the universal label “human.”
Exhibition is held 1 September – 20 September, 12:00 – 20:00 at the 1st floor of the Jongdo Building, 21-6 Mullae-dong 2-ga, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul
Closed on Mondays (9/7 and 9/14) · Free admission
For more information, visit: https://anthroydp.site
