The SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation will resume the “SONGEUN x STEDELIJK: Video Club” screening program this coming April. Organized in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the program was successfully held four times between 2023 and 2024. Beginning in 2026, it will return with expanded scale and deeper discourse, supported by Bulgari Korea.
 
All sessions in 2026, running from April through December, will be curated respectively by Melanie Bühler, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum, and Amsterdam-based artists Becket MWN and Josefin Arnell. Each will share artistic perspectives centered on the theme of expanding diverse narratives.
 
For each screening, the session’s curator, along with Lotte Kester—who oversees the Stedelijk Museum’s program—will visit Korea to introduce the works in person, offering audiences an opportunity to gain deeper insight into the artistic ecosystems of Korea and the Netherlands.

The first session in April, Beginning–middle–NOW, will open the program by surveying pioneering video works from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam collection, spanning from the 1970s to the present. Through the museum’s archive accumulated over the past half-century, Melanie Buhler offers audiences an opportunity to trace the evolution of the collection at a glance.
 
The second session, scheduled for July, will focus on the theme of Twinning and Coupling. Led by Becket MWN—a professor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and founder of the critical platform Tangents—the program will propose an original perspective on relationships and replication while exploring the various forms of connectivity that shape contemporary society.

The third session, Manosphere, scheduled for September to coincide with the period of Frieze Seoul, will be presented in connection with an exhibition of the same title planned for April 2026 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Grounded in the in-depth research of Melanie Buhler on masculinity, the program will explore contemporary discourses surrounding gender identity.
 
The fourth and final session of the 2026 program, taking place in the latter half of the year, will be curated by Josefin Arnell under the theme Vampirism and Extraction. Moving across media such as video, installation, and photography, Arnell will present her distinctive aesthetic perspective while focusing on provocative subject matter and offering a personal interpretation of the Stedelijk collection.

The program goes beyond a simple screening series, contributing to the sustained presence of Korean artists’ immaterial practices within an international institutional context. As part of this initiative, following the selection of works by Jungju An and Sojung Jun for the time-based media collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam during the 2023–2024 program, four additional Korean artists active in the contemporary art scene—Sungsil Ryu, Min Oh, Seung Ae Lee, and Young-jun Tak—have been selected through the 2026–2027 program.
 
The works confirmed for acquisition are CHERRY BOMB (2018) by Sungsil Ryu; Simultaneity, Lecture (2025) by Min Oh; The Wanderer I (2023) by Seung Ae Lee; and Wohin? (2022) by Young-jun Tak.

This acquisition was carried out in collaboration with Bulgari Korea and SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation. Four media artists were selected from among those who had previously participated in the foundation’s exhibition programs, and one work by each artist was purchased and donated to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, bringing the total number of donated works to four.
 
In addition, a special screening featuring six Korean artists selected as finalists will be presented at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in May 2026 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the SONGEUN Art Award. Although the event was originally scheduled for 2027, the schedule has been moved forward to 2026—the award’s 25th anniversary year—recognizing that all participating artists are finalists and prize recipients of the SONGEUN Art Award.
 
The screening will highlight the works of Korean artists for audiences in the Netherlands, creating a meaningful opportunity to spotlight Korean contemporary art on the international stage.

References

• 송은문화재단 보도자료 (SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation Press Release