The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain is an exhibition that considers the role of contemporary art museums within the context of ‘sharing’, the 2023 institutional agenda of Seoul Museum of Art. Traditionally, art museums have functioned as spaces for collecting, researching and exhibiting artworks. Today, however, museums are transforming into social spaces that build shared experience and collective values through engagement with diverse clusters of people. The ideas towards the relationship such as ‘mutuality’ and ‘interconnectedness’ become important values for museum activities. Sharing, which involves distributing what one owns, necessitates the presence of others. It is in this sense that sharing becomes a value that helps us reconsider the practice of contemporary art museums that place ‘relationships’ at its core. What, then, do we share in the museum, and with whom?
The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain brings collections―the museum’s representative public resources― to the centre of sharing. It is a place for us to encounter and speak with each other, holding as its starting point the collections of three institutions: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Sharing, as practised by the art museum, is a journey to find common ground amidst misunderstandings, differences and surprises within unexpected encounters, thereby reconfiguring our own respective bounds of knowledge along the way. As such, the artworks in this exhibition go beyond objects of appreciation and instead become tools and catalysts that connect and intertwine our varying ways of life, creating a new practice of sharing.