Excluding those times when displayed in exhibitions, the vast museum collections remain stored deep within museum cellars destined to be forgotten. Married by Powers is a project that re-illuminates varying aspects of these collections, exhibiting them and imbuing them with new meaning. Together with the Mediacity Seoul 2016 exhibition team, Bik Van der Pol made a preliminary selection of 139 pieces from among the nearly 4,000 pieces in the collection of the Seoul Museum of Art. The task of selection was guided by some basic questions including the following: Does the artwork contribute to an understanding of the context of Korean contemporary art and society? Is the work related to the key questions posed by Mediacity Seoul 2016? And, does the work provide a way of viewing the geographical, historical, and social landscape of the city of Seoul? Next, six guest curators (media researcher Jung-Yeon Ma, SF novelist Soyeon Jeong, French literature scholar Kyung Hee Youn, artist Park Hyun-jung, film director Joon-Hwan Jang, artist Yeon-Yong Kim, in the order of the rotating exhibitions), each active in different cultural sectors in Korea, were invited to choose pieces from the preliminary selection of 139 pieces, which were structured into six separate but interwoven exhibitions to be held in rotation. In choosing the method of pulling the storage environment up into the exhibition hall, the installation was designed in keeping with the other works exhibited in Mediacity Seoul 2016. Along with three artworks chosen by Bik Van der Pol, seven videos of interviews with Bik Van der Pol and the six guest curators, explaining their intentions on choosing artworks from the collection list, are exhibited for the entire duration of the exhibition as a kind of parameter that mediates the space. To some, this scene may seem like a disaster zone, but to others it will feel like a place where the gifts we have inherited are outspread before us.

“Imagination about Space to Twist Here and Now” is a project curated by guest curator Soyeon Jeong.