30 Nov 2018 – 1
Dec 2018
The National Museum of Modern
and Contemporary Art, presents the international symposium “What Do Museums
Collect?” from Friday, November 30 to Saturday, December 1 in the Multi-project
Hall of MMCA Seoul.
This symposium is the second academic event held as part of the
MMCA’s museum research project launched as an effort to reinforce the
museums’ investigative capacities as well as to invigorate debates and
dialogues on contemporary art. Experts from world-renowned art institutions
such as the Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Getty Research
Institute will participate in the event to hold extensive discussions on one of
the major issues of contemporary art: the meaning and purpose of collecting and
its methodologies and policies. Last April, the museum research project has
explored the practicality of curating through the symposium “What Do Museums
Research?”
Over the course of two days
from Friday, November 30 to Saturday, December 1, five sessions will proceed as
parts of this symposium. The theme of Day 1 is “Collections by Museums and Others: Diversity and Inclusion Beyond
Postcolonialism,” discussing the functions and roles museums must embrace
beyond postcolonial perspectives in collecting art from other ethnicities. With
changes in the globalization paradigm and the increasing number of immigrants
in Korea, a better understanding of different cultures has become a pressing
matter. This symposium will give the MMCA a sense of direction as it advances
into an international art museum advocating diversity and acceptance in the era
of globalization. The keynote speech will be given by Tony Bennett, research professor in social and cultural theory at the
Institute of Culture and Society of Western Sydney University, an
authoritative figure in cultural theory and museum studies.
Session 1, opened by Tony
Bennett, will focus on how Australia’s indigenous art has become
institutionalized in the process of accepting its colonial history, exploring
the idea in conjunction with the colonial discourse of “otherness,” which could
not be defined by the dialogues on post-structuralism. He has also analyzed the
power structure in exhibitions through his book, The Birth of the Museum (1995).
In Session 2, Lisa Horikawa, deputy director of
collections development at National Gallery Singapore, will examine how the
national museum of Singapore, a nation that has naturally come to include
different races and cultures since its independence from the Federation of
Malaysia, defines and collects art from different cultural origins. Following
Horikawa, Jang Yeop, head of the
education and culture department at MMCA, will present MMCA’s future
collection strategies towards diversity and inclusion based on his studies of
the MMCA collections. Im San, assistant
professor in the Department of Curatorial Studies and Art Management at Dongduk
Women’s University, will brief on the historical and theoretical background
of museum art collections and propose ideal perspectives and attitudes towards
the era dominated by Western artistic and cultural discourses. Lastly, Joan Young, director of curatorial affairs
at the Guggenheim Museum, will introduce the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art
Initiative and discuss methodologies for researching and collecting artworks
from geographical regions that have been neglected from the modern art scene.
The theme of Day 2 is “Museum Collection Strategy and Remediation:
Rewriting Art—History, Digital Humanity, and Artwork Destiny.” Sessions 3 through
5 deal with problems arising from
collecting diverse media and materials in the context of today’s
ever-changing art formats and how to
approach them. As museum collections are closely linked to the programs of
each institution, such as exhibitions, education, and preservation, museums are
required to reconsider their physical and value systems. This portion of the
symposium will highlight the changes happening in contemporary art and the
problems of contemporary art collection in search of practical solutions
implementable by MMCA. Terry Smith, Andrew W. Melon Professor of Contemporary
Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, will open with a
keynote speech.
Led by Terry Smith, Session 3
will examine the ways in which contemporary art museums intervene in the art
system, operating and controlling art history through their collections. Smith
has explained the notion of the general term “contemporary” in his book What is Contemporary Art? (2009).
In Session 4, Sven Beckstette, curator at Hamburger
Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, will present newfound revelations in
Germany’s social history centering around his experience of organizing the
exhibition Hello World. Revising a
Collection held at Hamburger Bahnhof. Marcella
Lista, chief curator of the New Media Collections at Centre Pompidou, will
analyze significant exhibitions from Les
Immatériaux by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1985) to recent
shows, explaining how museum art collections have been studied, exhibited, preserved,
and remediated within the institutions. Emily
Pugh, Getty Research Institute’s digital humanity specialist, will give an
overview of Getty’s digital humanities project collective of images,
information, and data, suggesting that art institutions’ collected works can
serve as more than keepsakes when they are applied or reproduced into a variety
of programs.
In Session 5, Jang Sunny, curator at MMCA, will
present multiple perspectives on the life and cycles of works that exist out of
the audiences’ sight. Following Jang, Oh
Inhwan, department chair of painting at Seoul National University College of
Fine Arts, will explain, from an artist’s perspective, how conceptual
artworks contradict the purpose of collection. Lastly, Beryl Graham, professor of new media art at the University of
Sunderland, will share various case studies of artists to address the
recent issues in collection and restoration surrounding new media art.
Bartomeu Marí, director of the
MMCA, announced, “The museum research project will present expanded terrain
maps of Korean contemporary art for the domestic and international art scenes.”
□ For general enquiries, please call +82-2-3701-9500
(MMCA Seoul)
