The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain

Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA; General Director CHOI Eunju) presents The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain, running from December 7, 2023 to March 3, 2024.

Central to this initiative is SeMA’s collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery—Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in Singapore. The partnership, spanning three years, envisions a different set of relationships and their outcomes as a commons through co-researching, co-programming, co-commissioning, and co-publishing, using the collections of the three institutions as shared resources. Over the three years, as it moves around the institutions, the project will re-examine and expand the notion and ways of ‘sharing’, which is the idea behind SeMA’s 2023 institutional agenda. A key feature of this collaboration are the “Glossary Dialogues”, a series of regular meetings aimed at fostering a deeper understanding between the three partnering museums which ultimately evolve into forms of exhibitions, public programs, and publications.

The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain, the first part of the project, explores the role of contemporary art museums in relation to the notion of ‘sharing’. Asking “how can we share with people from other cultures, languages, and whose senses and bodies are different”, the three institutions discuss and challenge ideas and ways of sharing. Anchored within their respective collections, this exhibition becomes a place to encounter, gather and take part in a journey to produce collective values and shared experiences amidst misunderstandings, differences and surprises with the unexpected. This exhibition utilizes ‘action-words’ to imagine the movements that must take precedence when we attempt to practice sharing in the art museum, and more broadly, in life. The six different action-words that emerged from the dialogues become the compositional basis for clusters of artworks, the 69 selected works becoming tools and catalysts to connect and intertwine the various situated knowledge and lived experiences beyond being objects of appreciation. This exhibition proposes diverse situations and gatherings, inviting people to engage in the practice of sharing. Sharing, as practiced by the art museum, is thereby an act of reconfiguring one’s own respective bounds of knowledge along the way to co-create shared knowledge and collective values. 

Participating artists
Kang Eun Yup, Koo Soohyun, Kim Beom, Gimhongsok, Kim Shin Rok & Gimhongsok, Kiri Dalena, Fyerool Darma, Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC, Son Hyemin, Ryu Soyoon), Michael Lee, Convening the Untitleds (Eunha Chang, Teng Yen Hui, Ruha Fifita), Lee Wen, Lim Tzay Chuen, Angelica Mesiti, Bonita Ely, Lee Ufan, Mire Lee, Yee I-Lann, Heman Chong, Heman Chong and Renee Staal, Tang Da Wu, Gary-Ross Pastrana & Zoe Dulay & Lim Jeong Soo, Part-time Suite, Brian Fuata, Emily Floyd, D Harding, Ham Yang Ah, Amanda Heng, Hong Myung-Seop, Hong Misun, Hong Lee, Hyun-Sook, Sasa[44]

Curated by Gahee Park (Curator, SeMA) in dialogue with Ong Puay Khim (Deputy Director, Collections and Public Art, Singapore Art Museum), and Reuben Keehan (Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art), and in assistance with Eunha Chang (Exhibition Coordinator, SeMA)

Organized by Seoul Museum of Art

Collaborated with Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery—Gallery of Modern Art 

Supported by Australian Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, Australian Embassy in Republic of Korea, KOREAN AIR, ODE AUDIO