“Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense” Installation view at MMCA, Seoul ©MMCAThe National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul will present Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense from April 12 to July 23. ‘Watch and Chill’ is an international collaborative project that explores the ways in which museums, artists, and audiences share art in contemporary times, centered on an online art streaming platform built by MMCA.
‘Watch and Chill’ is a three-year project that seeks to promote art cross-border through multilateral exchanges. Following a collaboration with Asian museums in 2021 and a partnership with museums in Europe and the Middle East in 2022, ‘Watch & Chill 3.0’ will be launched this year in collaboration with leading art institutions in the Americas and Oceania.
For ‘Watch and Chill 3.0’, leading art institutions in the Americas and Oceania will collaborate with the MMCA to curate works from their collections and local artists, sharing them on an online platform where visitors can view them via streaming subscription. It will also be realized in the physical space through an international tour at partner museums, starting with a showcase at the Seoul Museum this year.
This year’s program is divided into five subtopics under the overarching theme of ‘Streaming Suspense’. The exhibition presents 28 works by artists, designers, and filmmakers who employ the language and methodology of thrillers through storytelling and figuration, exploring the possibilities of a space and time occupied by immersion and suspense.
The five subthemes are ‘Landscape under Moonlight’, ‘Assembly of Evidence’, ‘Mutable Corpus’, ‘Performance of the Undead’, and ‘Post-dystopian Worldbuilding’. The subthemes focus on the unique bodies of work of artists working primarily in the medium of video and examine the alternative narratives and worldviews they propose. They consider the contemporary implications of narratives that destabilize, offend, and create tension in reality, such as strangeness, shape-shifting, mutating bodies, and non-normativity.
