”MMCA Photographs Collection: What’s the Time in Your World?” Installation view. Photo: Gim Ikhyun ©MMCAThe National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents “MMCA Photographs Collection: What’s the Time in Your World?” through August 4 at its Gwacheon branch.
Marking the first exhibition of works in the museum’s photograph collection since 2014, “What’s the Time in Your World?” presents some 200 carefully selected works by 34 photographers from Korea and abroad from over 1,300 works owned by the museum. Featuring landscape and portrait photographs that illustrate the timeline from the 1950s to the 2000s, this comprehensive exhibition illuminates hidden aspects of our lived reality, the city, daily life, and historical/social events. Providing an overview of the stages and contexts through which Korean contemporary photography has progressed, the exhibition also offers an understanding of the technological evolution of photographic media.
The title of the exhibition was borrowed from the Iranian film What’s the Time in Your World? (2014). Just as a photograph in the film transports the protagonist to a certain time in the past, the exhibition title implies that the photographs brought out of the museum’s conservation room will connect viewers to the time and place they capture. The exhibition is composed of three parts that explore the themes of the city, daily life, and historical and social events: Part 1, “The City Comes Before Your Eyes,” Part 2, “The Way to Retrieve Images from the Passage of Time,” and Part 3, “What’s the Time in Your World?”
By overlapping images of the featured works onto the archival photos and videos on display, viewers can retrace the history of city transformation and changes in everyday landscapes from multiple perspectives. Scheduled to be published in time for the opening of the exhibition, the exhibition catalog will contain detailed descriptions of the featured works, an essay titled “Gazing at the Horizon” by novelist and film major Seo Ije, and a review titled “A Landscape in Contemporary Photography” by photo and video theorist Jung Hoon to aid in the understanding of the exhibition.
