“The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain” Installation view ©Seoul Museum of Art
Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents “The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain”, an exhibition that considers the role of contemporary art museums within the context of ‘sharing’, the 2023 institutional agenda of SeMA, at Seosomun Main Branch through March 3.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), and brings collections – the museum’s representative public resources – to the center of sharing, with research, performances, and workshops as well as exhibitions. This exhibition aims to reconsider contemporary museum practice centered on ‘relationships’, noting that museums are changing from spaces for collecting, researching, and exhibiting artworks to social spaces where diverse groups of people come into contact, communicate, and create shared experiences and values.
This exhibition utilises action-words to imagine the movements that must take precedence when we attempt to practise sharing in the art museum, and more broadly, within life. The work of facing someone beyond my comfort zone (love-ing), the will to understand the language of an other (translate-ing), the process of discovering and forming a relationship with meanings beyond language (abstract-ing and silence-ing), the movements to build collective experiences and senses (statue-ing), the practice of connecting such movements in various directions (island-ing) and the attempt to thereby create new shapes (webbed-ing)―all of these unfold within a network of specific situations, movements and artworks. The audiences may follow this chain of practice among the artworks or re-examine the meaning of sharing as they reconstruct their own relational network.
“The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain” is the first of a three-year collections project, in which the three institutions will curate and deliver a range of programs centered around their collections, with the host institution rotating each year. In 2024, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) will lead the program; in 2025, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) will lead the program; and in 2026, a book will be published by London-based publisher Afterall, bringing the three programs together through a shared lens.
