Duty Free Art

‘Duty’라는 영어 단어에는 의무와 과세 두 가지 의미가 담겨있다. 시리아 국립박물관 재건 계획이 정권에 대한 시위 및 내전으로 취소되고, 터키의 디야르바크르 시립미술관이 난민대피소로 사용되고 있다. 이렇듯 과거 국가미술관은 국가에게 있었다. 시공간이 해체되고 국경과 민족에 대한 경계가 불안정할 때 민족을 대표하는 공적 미술관이 맡아야 하는 새로운 의무는 무엇인가? 공통의 안정적 지반이 무너진 특수한 사회적 지형 가운데 미술관의 새로운 물리적 영토와 데이터적 지반에 새로운 동시대 미술관이 등장하였다.

trans.The English word 'duty' carries two meanings: obligation and taxation. Plans to rebuild the Syrian national museum were cancelled by protests against the regime and by civil war, and the municipal art museum in Diyarbakir, Turkey, is being used as a refugee shelter. In the past the national museum belonged to the nation. When space and time come apart and the boundaries of border and people grow unstable, what is the new duty that a public museum representing a people must assume? Amid a peculiar social terrain in which the common stable ground has collapsed, a new contemporary museum has appeared, on the museum's new physical territory and data foundation.

윤민주 (Yun Min-ju), ArtInsight, 2022-06-02 · in ko · read the full text

In Duty Free Art, a lecture separated into 9 chapters begins with a statement: “To build a museum, a nation is not necessary.” The commissioned video exists at the second gallery space a couple blocs away from Steyerl’s video-essays. While the other videos such as Liquidity Inc. and In Free Fall make use of cinematic installation techniques, the video lectures are exhibited on monitor screens in the light of day. The viewer sits upon sand bags fashioned to function as chairs. The site appears as a war zone, echoing Steyerl’s concept that contemporary art thrives in a post-genocidal, crisis-driven world with rampant tax evasion and under-employed art laborers. 2 A ceiling projection projects a digital rendering of a duty free art holding site outside Geneva, Switzerland where famous and prestigious art collections are housed. Since the withholdings do not have to be reported, it is invisible and inaccessible to the public record—existing in many ways outside of history, and exterior to temporal flows.

Vanessa Gravenor, THE SEEN, 2015 · read the full text