Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge

Curated by Sophie Landres

September 6 – December 7, 2025
Morgan Anderson and Howard Greenberg Family Galleries

As platforms for generating and sharing information appear increasingly dematerialized and integrated with forms of artificial intelligence, Bodies of Knowledge redirects attention back to the living beings and physical substrates on which human knowledge depends. Interweaving craft traditions with fleeting technologies, the exhibition explores the complex ways digital text and textiles serve as vehicles for meaning, identity and social connection. Both are seen as symbolic extensions of the body, forms through which we communicate, and physical materials that impact our environment. 

Primarily made from massive accumulations of donated or discarded materials, several pieces in the exhibition point to the immense quantities of human labor that make contemporary forms of communication possible and the staggering amount of waste that results. Such proliferations of waste suggest a fundamental disconnect between information consumption and our collective understanding of its ramifications. The exhibition’s consideration of textiles—not just as functional or decorative objects, but as active agents in the formation of social narratives, further emphasizes the often-overlooked physicality that underpins and sustains human knowledge.

While digital culture tends to construe exchanges as frictionless and between disembodied subjects, Shin’s work serves as an important reminder that bodies matter and that matter leaves a trace. In doing so, Bodies of Knowledge situates information as an aspect of material culture that is now both haptic and removed from human touch, connective and isolating, a carrier of worldviews and that which estranges us from our own ecology.

Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge is curated by Sophie Landres, Curator and Exhibitions Manager at The Dorsky Museum. It is made possible thanks to support from The Coby Foundation, Ltd.