"Walk to Envision,” the second of five exhibitions by international Museum as Hub partner organizations. Organized by Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea, the show features twelve new artworks by artists Koh Seung Wook, Sangdon Kim, Rho Jae Oon, and siren eun young jung. The exhibition is on view at the New Museum through July 6, 2008.
Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance a greater understanding of contemporary art, and is the cornerstone of the New Museum’s public programs and the fifth floor Education Center. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site at the New Museum, the Museum as Hub partnership was initiated by the New Museum in 2006, and includes the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Insa Art Space, (Seoul, Korea); the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
The culmination of a two-year project commissioning new artworks, “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, a Walk to Envision,” engages some of the most urgent issues in Dongducheon, South Korea. Located halfway between Seoul and the border of North Korea, Dongducheon is home to foreign military bases, occupying nearly half of the region. Overshadowed by governmental regulations, Dongducheon has become a site of collective invisibility and marginalization, a community pushed to the fringes by mega-structures of the military complex. Working within this context, the projects by the artists in “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, a Walk to Envision” function as a conduit for articulation and communication. The works attempt to locate Dongducheon from three frames of reference: an urban topology of the city; the language, speech, narratives, and memory of the invisible socio-historical subjects; and the role and function of art and artists in the construction of social subjectivities.
In the first year of programming, Museum as Hub partner organizations consider the topic of neighborhood to embark on an international exchange of ideas that appreciates the unique and divergent perspectives of a particular street, city, nation, or region of the world. Museum as Hub partners commissioned artists living or working in their home cities to address neighborhood with a focus on discursive and interactive projects.
The subject allows each organization to share artists’ projects relevant to concerns of each particular institution. It illuminates the context in which artists live and work and how arts organizations are charged with the responsibility to support and present challenging ideas. A Hub Fellow, an emerging scholar in residence from the partner’s home city, hosts each presentation at the New Museum, creating a bridge between the partner institution and its local context and the project’s presentation in New York. Additional Hub partner presentations will include Townhouse Gallery (opening July 10, 2008); New Museum (September 2008); and Van Abbemuseum (November 2008). -- www.newmuseum.org
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