Southerly

About the exhibition

Southerly was the first exhibition presented by Landless, bringing visual art and live performance together at M P Birla Millennium Art Gallery of the Bhavan. The project takes its name from a passage in Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind in which a southerly wind and the sound of an avalanche stir both reverence for nature and an awareness of human mortality. This coexistence of comfort and unease became a shared point of departure for artists working across moving image, sound, movement, sculpture and material practices.

The exhibition asked how the apparent continuity and abundance of the natural world might unsettle a person searching for a secure place within it. These questions were approached through encounters with particular works: the distributed screens and layered surfaces of SungHoon Song’s Waver, bodily movement, crafted objects and audiovisual performances. Rather than fixing the inquiry in a single account, the programme allowed distinct practices to give it different rhythms and physical forms.

Directed by Landless in collaboration with curators Eunbee Kim and Hanbyul Lee, Southerly treated the exhibition as a gathering whose meaning developed through the presence of its participants. The movement of performers and audiences connected works across the gallery, opening an ongoing conversation about anxiety, human finitude and the possibility of living alongside uncertainty.