[Summer 2026]
Storage Story
by Safia Belmenouar
Photography Seoul Museum of Art
29.05.2025 — 12.10.2025
[EXCERPT]
A compact, sculptural volume with a dark façade composed of horizontal lines that seem to be fragmented by natural light, the Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA), the first public museum in South Korea entirely devoted to photography, opened in spring 2025. Evoking a shutter in the process of opening, its architectural design transposes the photographic medium into its structure, making the building itself a metaphor for the image. This principle was extended to its interior for the curatorial project Storage Story, which brought together works by six South Korean artists in close dialogue with the venue, its site, its environment, and its archives (twenty thousand works and documents inherited from the Seoul Museum of Art, of which it is an annex).
Storage Story placed the photographic medium in relation to the material conditions of the creation of Photo SeMA, reflecting the history of the neighbourhood of Chang-dong, a former grain-storage district. The works functioned as “living depots” in which traces, fragments, gestures, and histories accumulate without ever becoming fixed. Structured around three axes – “material,” “archives,” and “information” – this inaugural exhibition brought together works ranging from documentary to conceptual. Through this critical reading, the museum became a living space in which multiple experiences, narratives, and reinterpretations intersected.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Safia Belmenouar holds a doctorate in aesthetics of photography and is an independent exhibition curator and author. She researches the relationships among fiction, documentary, and archives, envisaged as images’ narrative potentialities. More particularly, she connects them to the transmission and appropriation of visual stories, in which photography is addressed as an active space for identity construction.