The exhibition Staging Film: the relation of space and image in video art builds on Busan’s international reputation as a city of film, and its legacy as the host of one of the most important global film festivals. It seeks to explore the link between films seen in traditional cinema settings, and those that are experienced as an installation within a museum setting. Video art has stripped the fixedness of still images and traditional film collapsing their one point perspective and linear narrative. The exhibition is constructed along two main curatorial axes. The first highlights the literal act of staging through which each of the featured artists conceives and presents their videos within a distinct physical space. The second, a metaphorical one, emphasizes the process by which the artists present their subjects within the films themselves. They achieve this either directly, in referencing theater or set-design, or indirectly, in the way they consciously stage them encouraging the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze.

The exhibition comprises 12 seminal video installations by some of today’s most accomplished artists. The works are laid out across the space, in a non-chronological order, where each installation is presented in its own distinct environment. The videos are of varying lengths ranging from a 45-second loop to an 85-minute narrative. Each of these prominent works represent a different example of the relationship between the virtual image that the viewer encounters on the projected surface, and the physical space in which the installation is staged. With works that date from the early 1990s until today, the exhibition illustrates how over the past two decades video artists have been appropriating the vernacular of cinematic language. In subverting cinema’s technical and formal characteristics, they have challenged the boundaries of the medium itself, expanding the viewer’s experience of form, time and space.