The Growing Manual

Exhibition at Seoul Museum of Art and limited edition book The Growing Manual project works with artist collectives around the world to examine how artists are organising and improvising in response to the political, social and economic challenges they are currently faced with. The Growing Manual project is part publication, exhibition, market and temporary architecture, experiment in planting and growing as well as a micro economy and network of relations. The Growing Manual / SeMA Project Gallery, 2016 Following the publication of Volume 1 of the Growing Manual book, the first exhibition of the Growing Manual project brought various kinds of materials – individually and collectively produced – together in the space of the museum around three themes: matter, utopia and collectives in order to make a loose series of connections between ideas, images and circumstances. The aim at the time was to describe a circumference within which the exhibition could be considered. The principal image of the dream was the enabling capillary tissue across these connections, between the exterior world of facts and the interior world of emotions, between reality and the imagination. These indirect, glancing narratives and descriptions tugged in different directions. What resulted, however, was a sense of the diversity and range of work that comes together - for now - under the sign of the Growing Manual, through working with the interdependencies of cyber, geographic, and logical infrastructure, material, opportunity and chance encounter. In the Growing Manual Market at SeMA in 2016, materials including books, T-shirts, DVDs, objects and images produced by the artist collectives participating in the Growing Manual exhibition as well as produced by the Minor adjustment collective were available for sale over the course of one month. Also as part of the market numerous discursive public events were held in the actual space of the market as well as through Skype and video conferencing