Total Museum’s ‘Somebody Has to Collect It’ examines collecting as a responsibility

Visitors attend the opening reception of the ″Somebody Has to Collect It″ exhibition at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul, on April 29. [TOTAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART]

 

French art collectors Catherine and Renato Casciani do not call their collection of pieces a treasure. They call it a responsibility — and from April 30, roughly three decades of that responsibility are on view at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul, in the Lille-based couple’s first major presentation in Korea.

 

The exhibition, “Somebody Has to Collect It,” inaugurates the museum’s new “Collector/tion” project, a series that examines the contemporary collector — not as buyer, but as an actor sitting at the intersection of capital, memory and value-making. The exhibition is also an official program of the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France.

 


The Cascianis began collecting formally in 1997 and have built a body of work that leans heavily into video, a medium they describe as one of the sharpest tools available for capturing what societies prefer to look away from.

 

The 22 artists and collectives in the new show at the Total Museum are drawn entirely from their holdings, including Clement Cogitore, Bertille Bak, Emilie Brout, Maxime Marion, Melanie Bonajo and Regina Galindo. Their works move across precarious labor, state violence, colonial inheritance, the climate crisis and queer intimacy, organized loosely around what curators describe as “a passage from individual fragility to a wider ethic of care.”

 

A poster for the ″Somebody Has to Collect It″ at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art [TOTAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART]

 

The Cascianis’ practice has long pushed against the idea of the collection as private property. They lead “Cadre blanc,” a project in which 16 couples jointly purchase works and rotate them through one another’s homes, and in 2021 founded “Around Video,” a video art fair in Lille that buys from emerging artists each year and confers the Now/Here Prize.

 

Renato Casciani is also a patron of the Lille Metropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art, Villa Cavrois and Le Fresnoy, and a member of the French association ADIAF, a network of more than 400 collectors.

 

For the Total Museum, which marks its 50th anniversary this year, the show extends a line of inquiry begun with its 2023-25 collection exhibition “Hello, I’m Noh Joon-eui,” which traced founder Noh’s early acquisitions by young Korean artists. Both exhibitions present collecting less as a transaction than as a sustained act of attention.

 

“Somebody Has to Collect It” runs through May 31, with a 10,000 won ($6.75) admission for adults.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]