- Exhibition
Future Museology
Thu, September 17, 2026 – Sun, March 14, 2027
“Future Museology” explores new roles for art museums in collaboration with a consortium of nine domestic and international art museums.
“Going beyond the traditional functions of collecting and exhibiting artworks, the exhibition examines how art museums engage with society and expand into public spaces.
It also outlines the future direction for the Busan Museum of Art amid the evolving trends in the global art museum landscape.
In a post-digital era where society, institutions, and even our understanding of human existence are rapidly changing, museums, too, are facing a moment of transformation. As the boundaries between experts and non-experts, disciplines, the local and the global, and the virtual and the real continue to dissolve, what role should museums play, and what new approaches can they embrace?
The Busan Museum of Art presents Future Museology in collaboration with eight museums from around the world. Bringing together diverse experiments and practices developed by these institutions, the exhibition explores the directions and possibilities for museums in a changing society.
As the museum opens its doors once again in a new form, we look forward to welcoming you as we turn the next page for art, society, and the museum.” – Jinsuk Suh (Director, Busan Museum of Art)
Performance Review
by Jonas Lund
Museums are increasingly confronted with the impact of AI, raising questions about authorship and challenging institutions to classify AI as either a tool or a threat. Jonas Lund’s Performance Review experiments with this system by simulating museum operations within a live agentic framework.
The work stages the full cultural pipeline through which art is produced, evaluated, archived and disseminated. An AI agent instructs workers in the production of artworks, it writes wall texts, scores the audience response and creates art historical references. In this way, the museum is treated not as a neutral container, but revealed as a machine for producing legitimacy, value, and public relevance.
Presented in collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe, Performance Review envisions the future museum as a semi-autonomous institution: part factory, part archive, and part evaluation engine. The resulting installation makes visible the often-hidden processes through which institutions transform cultural activity into authority.
Within Future Museology, the AGENT serves as a critical mirror. It does not merely propose one possible future museum; it evaluates the conditions under which such futures are displayed and legitimized. Ultimately, the work turns the exhibition itself into material, asking how museums judge cultural value, what happens when these processes become automated and public, and what is place for people?
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Organizer
