MMCA Photographs Collection: What’s the Time in Your World?

The film What’s the Time in Your World? [1](2014), which lends its title to this exhibition, begins with a single photograph from hometown that had left over two decades ago. Just as the photograph in the film summoned the protagonist to a specific time in the past, this exhibition began in the hope that the photographs kept in the museum’s storage would transport viewers to specific landscapes and times. The exhibition MMCA Photographs Collection: What’s the Time in Your World? presents around 200 photographs, which were curated from MMCA’s collection consisting of 1,316 photographs, and the selected works depict scenes of the real world we live in. The exhibition unfolds them under three themes. By displaying photographs by various artists from the 1950s to the 2000s, the exhibition reminds us that times and generations are not separate from one another.

“The City Comes Before Your Eyes”
Our field of vision of landscapes is becoming increasingly shallow. As urbanization progresses, the height and density of buildings increase, obscuring the view of distant landscapes, leaving only the landscape right in front of us to be seen. The people today are familiar with digital devices and have come to own only closer and smaller landscapes. In "The City Comes Before Your Eyes," it revisits the visual context and depth of the city through photography, which we struggle to experience in our daily lives. Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s show the rebuilding of dilapidated the cities after the war and the people who live in them; photographs from the 1980s show the rapid construction of public infrastructure and housing complexes; photographs of the cities from the 1990s onwards reflecting modernization and redevelopment show the formation and transformation of cities.

“The Way to Retrieve Images from the Passage of Time”
While “The City Comes Before Your Eyes" explores our lives from a distance, “The Way to Retrieve Images from the Passage of Time” [2] looks at our lives from a closer perspective. The components and presentation of tourist attractions, as well as the models and brands of appliances in residential spaces, become essential elements for marking time in photography. In addition, the way people are dressed and their hairstyles tell us the lifestyle and culture that prevailed at a particular time.

“What’s the Time in Your World?”
The final section, “What’s the Time in Your World?” addresses the socio-political events that have influenced the way cities and everyday life, the subjects of the previous two sections, were formed. Some of the events may have threatened the collective survival, while some may be irrelevant to certain individuals. Either directly or indirectly, such incidents affect and change the landscape of life across time in a variety of ways.

The works presented in "What’s the Time in Your World?" enable us to engage with events we may have been unaware of or indifferent to, by living vicariously through them and altering the way we perceive them and our attitudes. To some extent, the exhibition aspires to prompt its viewers to recognize and reflect on the world and time they live in.

Circling back to the film with the same title, What’s the Time in Your World?  The protagonist, who returns to the hometown with a photo, discovers that the town is an unchanging place, while at the same time encountering it as a world that is different from the past. The protagonist looks the own world independently with ambivalence. The photographs in the What’s the Time in Your World? also pose questions to us: about the structure and time of the world we inhabit, where to stand, and where to look. It challenges us to look beyond the immediate landscape and time, urging us to find our own subjective lens of life.

[1] Safi Yazdanian, What’s the Time in Your World?, Road Film, 2014.
[2] Eun Hye Song, Language of Music: the Way to Retrieve the Notes from the Passage of Time, Seoul: Deltatime, 2021.