MMCA Performing Arts 2026 Showcase
○ Dates: August 28 (Fri) – September 3 (Thu), 2026
*Please refer to the schedule below for detailed program dates and times.
○ Venue: Multi-Project Hall, Gallery Madang, M-Floor Lobby, and other locations, MMCA Seoul
○ Ticket Open: Friday, August 14, 2026, 2:00 PM
○ Ticket Price: KRW 5,000 per program
※ 50% discount available for: Age 24 and under, Age 65 and over, Undergraduate students, Arts Pass holders, MMCA Paid Members (Family, Family+)
Launched in 2024, the MMCA Performing Arts Showcase aims to discover emerging artists and foster international exchange. This showcase presents works by young artists from different cities and countries alongside Korean artists, exploring new possibilities in interdisciplinary arts through artistic connections and exchanges that transcend geographical and temporal boundaries. The first edition was hosted in collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen, Denmark, with its showcase taking place at MMCA in September 2024, followed by the second showcase at Art Hub Copenhagen in April 2025. In 2025–2026, the showcase took the form of an exchange between MMCA and Japan's Kyoto Experiment. In 2026–2027, the exchange takes place with the Netherlands through a collaboration with Collective of Shades, consisting of Dutch and Korean curators (Sung Yonghee, Kim Shinu, Ingrid Vranken).
The Netherlands has a rich historical legacy of attention to the imperceptible. Rembrandt and Vermeer devoted themselves to fleeting light and humble still lifes, while Leeuwenhoek, through his microscope, opened up a world of microorganisms invisible to the naked eye. After all, as a nation shaped by its perpetual negotiation with water, it has cultivated a deep sensitivity to the subtlest shifts in its environment and ecology. In this year's Showcase program, we critically reflect on how this legacy of attentiveness can become a force of resistance in contemporary times. Through five teams of Dutch and Korean artists who pay attention to the small and the fragile, and to the fleeting moments of the here and now, we are invited to encounter the barely perceptible ecologies around us.
If the Showcase program unfolded the artists' perspective in performative forms, the collaborative project, The 16th Gwangju Biennale Dutch Pavilion: Garden of the Imperceptible, extends their gestures in the form of an exhibition. Nestled in a quiet corner of Missionary Wilson's House, this garden invites visitors to pause, bend down, and quietly attend to what exists beyond the inertia of visibility and speed.
[Program Schedule]
Aug 28-31
10:30-17:30
Salomé Mooij, The Shelter Atelier
Gallery Madang
Installation · Ongoing
1:1 Workshop · 30 min. per session
Sep 1
06:00-14:30
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Personal Mobile (Online) · Device-based Video · Ongoing (10 min.)
00:00-24:00
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Sunken Garden · Video Installation · Ongoing (24 Hours)
10:30-17:30
Salomé Mooij, The Shelter Atelier
Gallery Madang
Installation · Ongoing
1:1 Workshop · 30 min. per session .
13:00-13:50
Shin Seo, Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera
Multi-Project Hall · Performance · 50 min.
15:00-17:00
Wi Sunghee, They Heard It Began with the Ears
Multi-Project Hall · Participatory Performance · 120 min.
Sep 2
06:00-14:30
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Personal Mobile (Online) · Device-based Video · Ongoing (10 min.)
00:00-24:00
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Sunken Garden · Video Installation · Ongoing (24 Hours)
10:00-21:00
Sam Scheuermann, Suntracing
Corridor by Gallery Madang · Performance Installation · Ongoing
10:30-20:30
Salomé Mooij, The Shelter Atelier
Gallery Madang
Installation · Ongoing
1:1 Workshop · 30 min. per session
13:00-13:50
Shin Seo, Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera
Multi-Project Hall · Performance · 50 min.
15:00-17:00
Wi Sunghee, They Heard It Began with the Ears
Multi-Project Hall · Participatory Performance · 120 min.
18:30-19:15
Sam Scheuermann, Mirror Set-up
M-Floor Lobby · Performance Installation · 45 min.
19:30-20:20
Shin Seo, Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera
Multi-Project Hall · Performance · 50 min.
Sep 3
06:00-14:30
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Personal Mobile (Online) · Device-based Video · Ongoing (10 min.)
00:00-24:00
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Sunken Garden · Video Installation · Ongoing (24 Hours)
10:00-21:00
Sam Scheuermann, Suntracing
Corridor by Gallery Madang · Performance Installation · Ongoing
10:30-20:30
Salomé Mooij, The Shelter Atelier
Gallery Madang · Installation, 1:1 Workshop · 30 min. per session
Sessions begin every 30 minutes.
15:00-17:00
Wi Sunghee, They Heard It Began with the Ears
Multi-Project Hall · Participatory Performance · 120 min.
15:30-17:00
Talk, Working the Work
Multi-Project Hall Lobby / Sunken Garden
18:30-19:15
Sam Scheuermann, Mirror Set-up
M-Floor Lobby · Performance Installation · 45 min.
19:30-20:20
Shin Seo, Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera
Multi-Project Hall · Performance · 50 min.
Shin Seo, Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera
Multi-Project Hall · Performance · 50 min.
Pinhole cameras create an image by gathering, over an extended period, light entering through a tiny aperture rather than a lens. Unlike a conventional camera, which captures a fleeting instant, a pinhole camera continuously layers the light and movement present for as long as the shutter remains open onto a single sheet of film. The resulting image may appear to depict one moment, yet it contains a mingling of different times. Star, Femur, Pinhole Camera draws on this principle to summon distant times and beings onto a single stage. The work features the fossil of a human femur that broke and subsequently healed approximately 15,000 years ago, as well as a star in Omega Centauri whose light has traveled through space for some 15,000 years before reaching our eyes today. While the healed femur bears witness to a duration of care—to the time someone spent remaining beside an injured person so that they might survive—the star we see in the night sky is likewise a trace left by the distant past.
Throughout the performance, the pinhole camera records the stage and the beings that can be seen on it. The audience and performers, both of whom are spending time together in the darkness, also become subjects before the camera. Ancient traces inscribed in the human body, light that has crossed the cosmos, and the time of those people gathered in the theater in the present seep into one another on a single sheet of film. At the end of the performance, those three elements are connected through a grandmother’s story. Once the performance is over, the time spent occupying the same space remains on the film like a physical fossil. By superimposing the temporal distances separating beings that could never otherwise have met, the work conjures an “eternal present.” In doing so, it produces an unfamiliar sense of time in which past and present are not separate but coexist at the same time.
Shin Seo creates performances and installations using analog media such as pinhole cameras and film. Her work questions the linear, mechanistic view of time in which past, present, and future unfold in sequence. She explores states in which different temporalities overlap and coexist within a single place. Analog media not only record moments that have passed but also function as devices that unsettle the temporal sensibility most of us have come to take for granted, or what some might call our familiar sense of time. In this process, the theater becomes a site where beings belonging to different times and spaces are brought into material coexistence.
Production: shell lab
Performers: Dohgyoung Ee, Woohyuk Jung, Wonho Lee, Yuun A Jo
Support: OB/SCENE Focus
Produced with support from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Wi Sunghee, They Heard It Began with the Ears
Multi-Project Hall · Participatory Performance · 120 min.
Oral transmission is a means of recording and conveying that predates any sound recording device, writing, and musical notation. Stories are remembered and passed on as they move from one body to another. Beginning with an interest in sound, this work gradually turns toward questions about the listener. If no two ears are the same, how differently do we hear the same sound? What kind of experience is it to listen to what another person has already heard? Passing through different bodies, sounds become different memories and are conveyed anew in different words.
This work has no designated performers. Audience members gather in the theater to practice listening, exploring the theater and museum’s premises as they pay close attention to the sounds around them. They listen with their bodies to sounds that will soon disappear, commit them to memory, and then pass them on to others in words. As this process is repeated, the idea of a single author gradually dissolves. Belonging to no one person, the story passes through different ears and bodies and is rewritten with each transmission. That is how another original story comes to life at every moment.
With the body at the center of her practice, Wi Sunghee works across various genres, exploring the relationship between performance and everyday life. Through bodily movement and sensation, and through encounters with environments and other people, she asks how we perceive and relate to the world. By rearranging the positions of the stage and the auditorium, performer and audience, performance and everyday life, she disrupts the familiar conventions and structures that constitute performance. Her recent work focuses on the transient experiences that arise as people with different bodies pass through a shared span of time. She is also interested in the sensations and forms of order that come into being only when many people gather together in person.
Concept, Direction, Facilitator: Wi Sunghee
Collaborative Research Facilitator: Ko Kwonkeum, Kim Jiyeon, Choi EunA
Produced with support from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Rita Hoofwijk, Good morning 잘잤어?
Personal Mobile (Online) · Device-based Video · Ongoing (10 min.)
* This work is designed to be viewed on a mobile phone. A link to the work will be sent to you by text message before your reserved date. Please view the work at home on the morning of your museum visit. (Laptops and tablets are not supported.)
*The work concludes daily at 14:30 in a small gathering taking place in the Sunken Garden.
The sun is always somewhere about to rise. In Korea, it happens seven hours earlier than in the Netherlands. This installation begins in your own bedroom and takes you to Samcheong-dong, while we carry the night of Amsterdam in our pocket throughout the day. It becomes an invitation to move through a morning that has not happened yet.
Rita Hoofwijk is a Dutch artist collaborating internationally across site-responsive artistic and curatorial practices. Her works are not brought to a place, but unfold from it, often engaging the body. They take shape in various forms—from audio and text to spatial installations, walks, or performance. She currently serves as artistic director at SoAP – Space-oriented Artistic Practice.
By: Rita Hoofwijk
With: Hearin Jeong
Video: Kyulim Kim
Website: Ehud Neuhaus
Graphics: Ehud Neuhaus, Yvonne van Versendaal
Co-production: Space oriented Artistic Practice (SoAP)
Salomé Mooij, The Shelter Atelier
Gallery Madang
Installation · Ongoing
1:1 Workshop · 30 min. per session
The Shelter Atelier is an exploration of personal places of shelter—an inquiry into spaces that calm and harbor us. These are places where the noise of life subsides, allowing us to reconnect with another layer of existence. Through an intimate one-on-one session with the artist, each participant’s personal experience is translated into a miniature maquette made from found materials. The maquette becomes a small refuge, where discarded fragments and street-worn scraps take flight as fragile architectures of intimacy and safety—drifting away from the clamor of utility and into the quiet of belonging.
Salomé Mooij creates in-situ work at the intersection of performance and artistic research—physical thinking exercises driven by a desire to explore, unfold, and connect the micro and macro levels of our existence. By magnifying details, she aims to reveal a field of forces in which the audience can examine its own relationship as a participant.
By and with: Salomé Mooij
Translation and assistance: Kyunghoo Kathy Lee
Furniture production in Korea: Jin Sol
Korean presentation supported by: Performing Arts Fund NL
Sam Scheuermann, Suntracing
Corridor by Gallery Madang · Performance Installation · Ongoing
Suntracing is a durational, site-responsive performance installation that grapples with the futile act of trying to hold on to that which is most ephemeral: the present moment. By tracing the fleeting passage of sunlight, the work explores the relationality of time.
'The first time I traced the outlines of sunlight beaming through the windows of the respective building, the moment was short-lived. Within seconds, it disappeared, obscured by a passing cloud. When the sky cleared and offered us — the Sun and me — a bit more time together, I quickly realized its incredible speed. Or perhaps, my own, on top of a spinning and circling Earth. Before I could finish tracing even a small shape, the Sun had already slipped beyond the frame I had so carefully created. Not a single moment aligned, never fully 1:1.'
Sam Scheuermann is an artist working between visual arts, theatre, social, and urban practices. Interested in the mechanisms behind perception, she explores acts of looking, framing, and the politics of spectatorship. By turning our attention from what we see to how we see, her work becomes an invitation to sensing time, presence, and relationality.
Concept and direction: Sam Scheuermann
Production: Michael Scerbo
Performed by: Participants of the workshop
With artistic support of: Koen van der Heijden
External eye: Miguel Melgares, Tchelet Pearl Weisstub
Workshop translation: Kyunghoo Kathy Lee
Thanks to: DAS Theatre
Korean presentation supported by: Artists Circle and Space oriented Artistic Practice (SoAP)
Sam Scheuermann, Mirror Set-up
M-Floor Lobby · Performance Installation · 45 min.
Mirror set-up is an exploratory, site-responsive performance installation that examines the construction of our perception by observing observation itself. Navigating the mechanics of eyes, lenses, perspective, and framing, we immerse ourselves in a gradually unraveling composition, orchestration and live montage of the gaze and attention.
‘When tuning a radio, we are navigating noise with something we can potentially recognize: a word, a melody, a rhythm. But what if we don’t eliminate the noise? What happens when we turn our attention away from the specific sound we are yearning to hear, to the act of tuning itself, the act of orientation amidst all we experience?’
Concept and direction: Sam Scheuermann
Production: Michael Scerbo
Technical coordination: Koen van der Heijden
Sound design: Robbi Meertens
Performed by: Namoo Bae, Koen van der Heijden, Sojeong Lee, Sam Scheuermann
External eye: Lotte van den Berg, Zhana Ivanova, Miguel Melgares, Tchelet Pearl Weisstub
Thanks to: Hearin Jeong, Elliot Dehaspe, Peteris Viksna, DAS Theatre
Korean presentation supported by: Artists Circle and Space oriented Artistic Practice (SoAP)
Talk, Working the Work
This conversation explores the contemporary art landscape in the Netherlands and South Korea. It questions the ways in which artistic works are produced and circulated through funding structures and institutions, and imagines different forms of working. Rita Hoofwijk of SoAP (Space Oriented Artistic Practice), a collective of artists working beyond the theatre; Sam Scheuerman and Michael Scerbo of Artists Circle Amsterdam, a group of artists gathered around the question of "from institutions to instituting"; Kim Shinu, a producer exploring art ecologies that function like forests; and Sung Yonghee, curator of MMCA Performing Arts, come together to share their experiences and perspectives.
※ Notice
- Advance reservation is required to attend this performance.
- Due to the nature of the performance, late entry is not permitted. Please arrive at least 10 minutes before the scheduled performance time.
- Reservations may be cancelled until 6:00 PM on the day before the performance. After this deadline, cancellations and changes will no longer be accepted.
Curator: MMCA, Collective of Shades (Sung Yonghee, Kim Shinu, Ingrid Vranken)
Curatorial Assistant: Kim Jaeyeon, Yoon Soyoung, Oh Sumin, Han Yujin
Technical Director: Lee Kyoungmi
Production Technical Manager: Lee Yool
Lighting Supervisor: Kim Youngjun
Sound Supervisor: Woo Gyeongmin
Graphic Design: Lee Gunjung
Translation: Kim Hyunkyung
Sponsors & Collaborators:
The Mondriaan Fund
The Performing Arts Fund NL
Space oriented Artistic Practice (SoAP)
Operation: Woowhihi, Nearfuture Station
Sponsors & Collaborators
The Mondriaan Fund
The Performing Arts Fund NL
Space oriented Artistic Practice (SoAP)
With the support of
Hermès
Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Korea
