Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense

Artists:  Meriem Bennani, Pia Borg, Club Ate (Justin Shoulder, Bhenji Ra), Fyerool Darma, FHHH friends (Han Seungjae, Han Yangkyu, Yoon Hanjin), Cécile B. Evans, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Chitra Ganesh, Nic Hamilton, Kwon Hayoun, Jang Minseung, Jung Jaekyung, siren eun young jung, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Liang Luscombe, Garush Melkonyan, Alison Nguyen, Park Chan-kyong, Luiz Roque, Jacolby Satterwhte, Skawennati, Lior Shamriz, Song Sanghee, Karina Utomo and Cūrā8

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director Youn Bummo) presents Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense at MMCA Seoul from Wednesday, April 12 to Sunday, July 23 as the third season of Watch and Chill (watchandchill.kr), the world’s first subscription-based art streaming platform.

Created by MMCA and presented in collaboration with other prominent art institutions, Watch and Chill offers subscribers around the world the opportunity to stream the works from the participating institutions’ media collections and of the artists of each community. Launched in 2021l, its first season was a collaboration among four Asian museums, such as MCAD in Manila, MAIIAM in Chiang Mai, and M+ in Hong Kong, while the second season partnered with the Sharjah Art Foundation and ArkDes in Stockholm in 2022.

This year, for Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense, MMCA is partnering with TONO, the video and performance festival in Mexico City, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, with curators including Lee Jihoi, Samantha Ozer, Trevor Smith, and NGV’s Departments of Contemporary Art, Design, and Architecture. Under the theme of suspense as a methods of storytelling and imagining, Watch and Chill streams works from 23 artists in the different regions, while simultaneously showcasing them in physical spaces as internationally travelling exhibitions.

Watch and Chill subscribers will be alerted with a new work every week. (subtitled both in Korean and English.) The offline exhibition at MMCA Seoul presents City in Suspense, designed by the architectural studio FHHH friends (Han Seungjae, Han Yangkyu, Yoon Hanjin), providing visitors with an unique experience of suspense induced through the delay of information. Other participating artists, designers, and filmmakers from Asia, Oceania and the Americas include Club Ate (Justin Shoulder, Bhenji Ra), Fyerool Darma, Kwon Hayoun, Song Sanghee and Jacolby Satterwhite, among many others.

The contents for both the online platform and the offline exhibition experiment with the psyche of the uncanny, abnormality, shape-shifting, mutable bodies, and contemporary implications. They are organized under five sub-topics: “Landscape under Moonlight,” “Assembly of Evidence,” “Mutable Corpus,” “Performance of the Undead,” and “Post-dystopian Worldbuilding.”

Following its offline exhibition at MMCA Seoul, Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Senses is scheduled to open at the end of April at TONO Festival in Mexico City, in November at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and in March of next year at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The art streaming platform Watch and Chill will remain available until the final touring program concludes in April 2024.

Also available on the online platform is the satellite project The Tales I Tell 3.0. This project expands the scope of Watch and Chill through literary works focusing on the user experience of the online platform from the perspectives of the fields of  literature, sociology, and architecture. Other associated programs include a performance (June 9) titled “A Scene” that stages a re-enactment of a double murder in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866), a roundtable (June 10) titled “Decentralizing Curatorial: Digital Media and Simultaneous Spaces,” which brings together curators of Watch and Chill from season one to three, a conversation (July 14) titled “Architectural Scenarios for Moving-Images” with three architectural studios that materialized the streaming platform in a physical space over the years as well as architecture theorist Kim Junghye and film curator Kim Eunhee and a discussion (July 15) entitled “When Queers and Indigenous Entities Form the Future,” with artist siren eun young jung, Lior Shamriz and Skawennati, as well as scholars in visual culture Lee Won Jean and Mindy Seu. All of the events will be moderated by curator Jihoi Lee and will be recorded and streamed online after each event.