The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Director Youn Bummo) presents What Do Museums Connect?: Museums in a Post-Pandemic World through its symposium website (www.whatdomuseumsconnect.kr) from Tuesday, September 14 to Thursday, September 30. Designed in a non-face-to-face format considering the COVID-19 pandemic, the symposium will be available on the specially designed website that provides symposium information and the video presentations of ten international speakers with subtitles. There will also be a live roundtable on the last day of the symposium where the online participants will have a chance to talk to the presenters.

Amid the changes that the pandemic has caused, the role of the art museum and its methods in playing a social role have once again become widely discussed topics worldwide. What Do Museums Connect?: Museums in a Post-Pandemic World not only introduces the broadening and variation of museums’ approach to mediation, but also offers the very way that museums envision the world and the orientation of experiences. The ten researchers, curators, critics, and other professionals invited to this symposium each reflect on a different perspective as they discuss ways of defining the new roles of museums that the changing times demand, along with their cultural, social, and technological contexts.

This symposium consists of two sections. The speakers in the first section, titled Boundaries Dissolved: Other Variables share critical perspectives on the social and technological contexts of art museums today. Lee Kwang-Suk, an associate professor of digital cultural policy at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology, suggests future forms of technological practice as he divides technology in a data society into four types according to a critical thinker Ivan Illich: fetishistic technology, rigid technology, soft technology, and symbiotic technology. Geert Lovink, a world-renowned critic and founding director of the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures, shares a presentation using personally compiled images and recordings of his own musical compositions. He comments on darker influences present within social networking services and other parts of the online environment. Lev Manovich, a celebrated digital media scholar and graduate professor of computer science at the City University of New York, recognizes the importance of efforts at adaptation to the digital realm, but also encourages understanding of how the physical nature of the art museum is itself a unique medium. Seo Dongjin, a professor of intermedia art at Kaywon University of Art & Design, interrogates and considers alternatives to the existing connectivity that has been the premise of Global Art. Kwak Yung Bin, a visiting professor at Graduate School of Communication & Arts, Yonsei University, recalls the concepts of an Indian writer Arundhati Roy. He views the pandemic phenomenon as a portal leading us to a different place, as he critically discusses the dichotomy of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ that has been laid bare by the pandemic.

The second section, titled New Dimensions: Directions of Practice, features different examples of experiments within the aforementioned social contexts. Kay Watson, head of arts technologies for the Serpentine Gallery, explains the art technology program currently taking place at her institution in U.K, as well as future gallery strategies for making use of the metaverse. Hong Leeji, a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, shares examples of ‘disembodiment’ in online spaces being translated into artistic practice during the pandemic while emphasizing the importance of the sense of community that art’s digital future will demand. Sarah Kenderdine, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and director and lead curator of EPFL Pavilions, shares the example of her own large-scale interactive project as she offers examples of efforts to broaden public awareness through the innovation of technology. Rebecca Kahn, a researcher at the University of Vienna, remarks on the ways in which the global aspects of the art museum have come to the fore as the pandemic has accelerated an increase in online access, while discussing the social significance of the information and values that museums share with visitors to their online and offline spaces. Wu Dar-Kuen, a senior curator of the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), shares another example that responds to the pandemic by examining projects related to the artistic activity that has taken place in the Taiwanese art world.

A roundtable discussion will be broadcast live at 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 30 (UCT+9hrs). Among the presenters, Lee Kwang-Suk, Geert Lovink, Kay Watson, Hong Leeji, and Rebecca Kahn will participate in the conversation. The roundtable will also be accessible through the symposium website, where a Q&A session can be made available for online participants. After the symposium, the presenters’ papers are to be compiled into research collections for publication in both Korean and English.

This symposium is the fourth academic event of the MMCA research project What Do Museums Do? MMCA began this project in 2018 in an effort to reinforce its research capacity and contribute to vibrant discourse concerning contemporary art and museums. To date, it has included symposiums on the topics What Do Museums Research? (2018), What Do Museums Collect? (2018), and What Do Museums Change? (2019)

Youn Bummo, Director of MMCA noted that “the MMCA research project is an attempt to broaden the 21-century museum’s possibilities” and “I hope that this symposium will provide fascinating materials not only for specialists and professionals in related fields, but also for everyone who has an interest in these themes.”