2022 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art Pre-opening Public Program

Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves

• Prior to its opening, the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art has held a pre-opening public program annually, thus sharing its construction process with citizens, searching for a vision of the art museum in a multifaceted manner, and constructing concrete strategies in preparation for its opening while establishing the starting point for research projects. Held for the third time, the 2022 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art pre-opening public program “Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves” will gauge whether or not it is possible to redesign new forms of cultural production of contemporary art and art museums and perspectives for experiencing and pondering on them on the basis of an understanding of cultural, political, and economic relations surrounding a dramatically changing environment.

At an important turning point in the Digital Revolution, our lives and cultures and human behavior and senses are evolving to a new level of existence and perception. The international forum “Digital Culture and Art Museums” will prepare a basis for critical explorations of the operation and tasks of digital culture and discuss issues faced by diverse art museums and institutions in a distributed network society. It will search for the art museum’s strategies to expand cultural experiences in the Digital Age. Part 1 “Network Art Museums and Visitor Experiences” will examine whether art museums where analogue and digital platforms are connected can create new experiences and aid democratic and communal approaches to art. Part 2 “Digital Culture and Artistic Praxis” will examine what the ways of artistic production and thinking are in the Digital Age and what the tasks for the exhibition and collection of the digital arts are.

The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art’s intermedia lab will be planned as an analogue and digital platform through which discussions on trans-locality and community and digital culture and media with people from diverse fields can be expanded while the complexity of cities can be interpreted, and new artworks can be created. Held this year as a pilot program, the intermedia lab’s “Dissonance,” under the topics of infrastructures, care, mobile media, and artistic research (production and interpretation), will attempt to rewrite shared experiences in contemporary society, where social dialogues lead not to communication but to conflict, by connecting or intersecting disparate examples. First, on the level of reinterpreting cities and local spaces, culture and a sense of solidarity generated in the interrelationship between infrastructures and care will be discovered and recorded. Second, the landscapes and emotional structures of contemporary society changed by mobile media, which provide interfaces linked by mobile technology and have emerged as the media most familiar to us, will be explored, and changes in digital communication after disasters such as COVID-19 will be explored. Third, in “Artistic Research: Production and Interpretation,” the research methods and creative processes of artists who explore the interrelationships between nature and the environment, technology and data, human and non-human, and history and culture will be shared, and examples of diverse commissioned works executed in order to promote artistic production in an era of changes will be examined. In addition, data from a variety of fields including finance, politics, technology, education, and work as well as interviews and conversations generated in the process of producing artist Ham Yang Ah’s Undefined Panorama (2018-) out of the SeMA’s collection will be shared within new structures that make use of the openness and expansiveness of the web, and new approaches to the arts will be explored together. Through this, the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art will encourage interdisciplinary research in the fields of the visual arts and prepare both an environment for artists’ production and a basis for audiences’ understanding and participation.

This pre-opening public program will proceed both online and onsite, at the SeMA Learning Station/Coral and on the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art website, and the topics and the contents of the dialogues of the pre-opening public program, which will continue for three years, are scheduled to be publicized through the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art website and publications.