Introduction

A truck driver transporting explosives along the highway, the abandoned pigsties beneath it, and the soil where seven hundred fifty-three pigs lie buried.

This is a diary left unrecorded, an archive of bodies rotting underground, a nightmare we are all dreaming together.

The night when, at last, the irreversible world comes to a halt.

Curatorial Statement

What died, why, and how?
This question never remains a simple statement. It reaches beyond the bodies already buried, becoming an inquiry into an irreversible event that drifts through sensory residues, fragments of language, and the shadows of images.

Night soil, Nightmare emerges from <Gallop>, the award-winning play that received the 22nd Daesan University Literary Prize in Drama. It proposes a composite structure of thought in which exhibition and performance, moving image and sound, text and matter infiltrate one another. This work does not place performance and exhibition side by side. Instead, it dismantles the boundary between the two, allowing each medium to erode the other, turning the residues, gaps, and sensory fissures generated in that process into an event in themselves.

Here, the viewer is never a fixed spectator. They move between gallery and stage, collecting scenes from the play, gathering fragmented voices, sounds, images, smells, and traces, assembling their own narrative—yet no viewer can ever see the whole. Every event here is dispersed, time unfolds in layered strata, and space opens in multiple directions. The viewer remains always a witness to fragments, and a testifier to the absence of the whole. The work’s spatial structure is divided into three strata—the land where 753 pigs are buried, the emptied pigsty, and the highway carrying explosives. Yet these are not merely physical layers; they are cuts through sensory hierarchies and temporal planes. Each space observes and reflects the others through live video transmission.

Night soil, Nightmare is not representation but permeation. The performer communes with objects, sculpture is transformed through the performer’s movement, and one scene absorbs the traces of another. The language of the play no longer exists as sentences; it materializes as smell, soil, vibration, and afterimage. Language returns to a pre-spoken state and is retranslated through the performer’s body. This is a challenge to a human-centered sensory order. The slaughtered pigs’ bodies, the smell of manure and earth, the fragmented images and overlapping voices do not “represent” the senses of the Other—those long ignored by humans—but invite the viewer to be eroded by them. In doing so, the work becomes an ethical event—an invocation attuned to the resonances of the dead. Not as a tool of representation, but as a conduit of contagion and a collaborator in sensation. To breathe together with the afterglow of a vanished world.

Visitor Information

Viewing hours total three hours, with performances occurring continuously throughout the space. Visitors may move freely between Basement Level 1 and the second floor. However, once you exit the building, re-entry is not permitted. Upon entry, you will receive a leaflet (QR code) outlining the layout and flow of the event.

Sensitive Content

This exhibition includes certain elements that may cause psychological discomfort, including odors, scenes and sounds that evoke fear, and references to death presented in indirect forms. If you wish to leave during the program, you may do so at any time with guidance from the staff.

Accessibility

The exhibition space is largely inaccessible for wheelchair users, and no elevator or accessible restroom is available. If audio description or mobility assistance is needed, a staff member can accompany you and provide a pre-recorded audio guide voiced by the performer. For visitors who require caption-based guidance, the performance script can be provided in advance.