What Do Museums Change?—Art and Democracy

This research publication consists of the contents of presentations and additional texts engaging the subject of the MMCA’s international symposium, “What Do Museums Change?—Art and Democracy” that was held on June 28 and 29, 2019. The publication’s Supplement further incorporates the research created for the academic talk “Worlds at Stake: Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology,” which was held on June 26, 2019, and addressed critical approaches to the climate crisis and their effects on sociopolitical reality.

The year 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the MMCA as well as the centennial of the March 1st Movement and the launch of the Provisional Government of Korea. The MMCA’s past footsteps cannot be considered separately from modern Korean history. Through a lens of reconsidering the history of Korean democracy, from the decolonization movement that preceded the establishment of democracy to the pro-democracy movement that resisted the military dictatorship, and all the way through today’s Korean democracy that was recently achieved through the Candlelight Revolution, this publication and the two academic events created in conjunction with it examine the concept and praxis of democracy that can be discussed in museums and contemporary art today.

This publication comprises two axes of inquiries underlying the MMCA international symposium, “What Do Museums Change?—Art and Democracy.” The first inquiry is the practice of democracy in museums from the perspective of museology; the second is the representation and intervention of reality in contemporary art from the perspective of art history. As a variety of research agendas surround these two axes, this publication seeks to encompass a corresponding range of perspectives of scholars and curators from around the world.


Table of Contents

Foreword / Bummo Youn
Introduction to “What Do Museums Change?—Art and Democracy” / Sunhee Jang

Part I. Contemporary Art Museums and Practices of Democracy: Institution, Social Justice, and Activism
1) Democratic Museum / Zdenka Badovinac
2) The Meaning and Evaluation of 15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980–1994 / Tae Man Choi
3) “The Arts and Culture Blacklist” and Democratizing the Museum: Questions for the “Survival” and “Democracy” of Art / Sohyun Park
4) Dance, Performance, and Social Media in the Postdigital Museum / Claire Bishop
5) Educational Practice for the Next Generation’s Museum Experience: A Case Study of the MMCA 2019 Youth Special Workshop / Hyojin Shim
6) How Museums Can Function as Democratic Spaces Promoting Social Justice and Inclusion / Viv Golding
7) New Strategies in the Time of Necropolitics: Socio-environmental Art Practices in the Southern Cone of America / Alejandro Meitin

Part II. Contemporary Art and Representation of Democracy: Transnational Democracy, Regions/Borders, and Post-representation
8) Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction / T. J. Demos
9) Border Crossing and the Edges of Citizenship: Pictures from the US-Mexico Border / Terri Weissman
10) Post-truth, Parafiction, and Contemporary Visual Culture / Sunhee Jang
11) We-All-Fall-Down: Thinking through Lines of Proximity and Ubuntu as Decolonizing Praxis in South African Museum Re-Presentations /Sharlene Khan
12) Korean Art and the City after Minjung Art / Chunghoon Shin
13) Better Tomorrows: Science Fiction, Art, and Politics in South Korea, 1960s-2010s / Sunyoung Park

Supplement. Worlds at Stake: Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology
14) Worlds to Come: Geoengineering, Conflictual Futurisms, and the Unthinkable / T. J. Demos
15) When Water Becomes a Weapon: The Art and Politics of Toxicity and Violence in American Cities / Terri Weissman