Leaving the museum, as we know it, addresses the growing attention and expectation of museums to operate beyond their traditionally defining and sacred buildings. When our audience does not come to us, we should reach out and come to them – engaging with new audiences in new ways. 

The seminar taps into this development but would also like to move beyond the where and how museums operate today, and instead ask even more fundamental questions that also lies at the center of the Nordic network, Museum Why? Where do we find more radical progressions and challenges in terms of the very idea of the museum and its entanglement with and function in society today?

We have invited international thinkers and practitioners to share both reflections and concrete cases and aim to create an open space for exchange and discussion around these exciting themes and ongoing developments.

The seminar is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde within the context of the network Museum Why, and also in connection with the museum’s first exhibition in the former psychiatric hospital, Sankt Hans, which will be the museum’s main exhibition platform for the next three years. The seminar will be held in one the most famous hospital buildings, Kurhuset, from 1860, and there will also be a guided tour of the exhibition as part of the programme.

Where: Kurshussalen, Sankt Hans Hospital, Kurhusvænge 3, 4000 Roskilde

Lunch, coffee and cake is included in the price.

NB. The seminar is in english

Ticket & lunch: 100 kr.

Student ticket & lunch: 50 kr.

Buy a ticket here

SUPRAINFINIT RESIDENCY

Inspired by the idea of the returned invitation Apparatus 22, one of the artists in residence formations in the Museum Why network, carefully curated a gathering for the group of institutions in Bruxelles May 2023. The network spend three days together talking about institutional change and renegotiated visions in the language of the Suprainfinit.

RESEARCH AND WORKSHOP BY SALTY XI JIE NG

Salty Xi Jie Ng (SG) co-creates semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the intimatevernacular. Her interdisciplinary work proposes a collective re-imagining through humour, care, subversion, discomfort, a celebration ofthe eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. Her projects explore themes of aging, intimacy, food, lineage, identity, ritual and power, while questioning who artists are and what gets to be called art. 

In connection to the EAT THE RICH seminar in Malmö Salty Xi Jie Ng conducted a workshop as her curator persona Sheralynne Dollatella-Wong Jia for a Nordic-based group of museum directors, curators, and artists asking questions relating to art institutions’ acquisitioning strategy and views on collecting diverse media forms.

Credit
Salty Xi Jie Ng aka Sheralynne Dollatella-Wong Jia (Artist)

SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / EAT THE RICH

ENGLISH

Featuring
Tabita Rezaire (FR), Hanni Kamaly (NO), Floating Museum (US), Apparatus 22 (RO)

SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / EAT THE RICH

ENGLISH

Featuring
Franziska Hoppe (DK), Rana Dasgupta (UK/IN)/Özlem Saglanmak (DK), Whose Museum (SE/CA), and Mette Riise (DK)

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / EAT THE RICH

Monuments of Suburbia: The Spatial Politics of Public Art in Helsinki by Minna Henriksson. A text from the publication Sustainable Societies for the Future.

This text approaches the topic of urban development and segregation of the suburbs in Helsinki through observations of its public space. To clarify from the start, when discussing segregation in the Nordic countries, as well as issues surrounding inequality and the polarization of societies, we must first acknowledge that the Nordic countries are societies founded on racist institutional practices. Race science was a highly influential scientific discipline in each of them during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While traces of these practices in the sphere of science have been actively hidden, in other fields such as art, they remain very much present. Race science, which gave birth to eugenics laws, were in place in all Nordic countries until the end of the 1960s, and in some until the end of the 1970s.

Credit
Minna Henriksson (Writer)
Motto Books (Publisher)
Olga Prader (Designer)

Credit
Salty Xi Jie Ng aka Sheralynne Dollatella-Wong Jia (Artist)
Art & Market

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / EAT THE RICH

‘A Performance Lecture: Dear Singapore Art Museum Acquisition Committee’ took place on 16 January from 2pm to 3pm at the Main Deck, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, as part of SAW Dialogues 2022, presented by Art & Market in partnership with National Arts Council, Singapore. It explored the intricate relationship between museums and practitioners of social forms of art, as well as highlighting future directions for the progressive development of such a relationship. Conducted in a performance lecture format, the event was hosted by Salty Xi Jie Ng, Artist and Pilot Resident of Singapore Art Museum, in collaboration with Shayus Sharif, Bras Basah Open, current EX-SITU: Art Spaces Residents of Singapore Art Museum.

The performance lecture saw a lively presentation of Xi Jie’s research interspersed with dramatic elements, including a mock exhibition space outside the room. Audiences were also encouraged to participate in the performance lecture by casting votes during key points of the presentation. Towards the end of the event, the speakers laid out a budget red carpet – in the form of a red string – for Zarina Muhammad, art practitioner and lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, to deliver an excerpt from her work, ‘9 Questions as Instructions to Construct Pragmatic Prayers for Peculiar Habitats’.

Salty Xi Jie Ng (SG) co-creates semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the interdimensional intimate vernacular. Often playing with relational possibilities, her transdisciplinary work is manifested from fantasy scores for the present and future that propose a collective re-imagining through humour, care, subversion, play, discomfort, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. Her practice dances across forms such as brief encounter, collaborative space, variety show, poem, conversation, meal, publication, film, performance.

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / EAT THE RICH

A guided tour of Saxo Bank’s Copenhagen headquarters reveals the wealth, both symbolic and literal, of artworks and other exhibits acquired by the firm to furnish their offices while inspiring and motivating its employees. It is a prime example of a corporate art collection, a powerful tool to embody and project the values of a company, both internally and to the outside world: art is deployed to contaminate the world of finance with its ambitious ideas, and vice-versa.’

Hannibal Andersen (DK) is a Copenhagen based visual artist who works in the dynamic and speculative terrain where economics, politics, and ideology intersect. Andersen’s work deals with themes such as money, debt, finance, (de)commodification, branding, intellectual property and the implications of relentless privatization. As such, his practice seeks to provide a glimpse into the clandestine political economic mechanisms at play in and between institutions of power. Andersen has exhibited, performed, and researched widely in Denmark and abroad and has a forthcoming residency at ISCP in New York in 2023, and a public mural in collaboration with Kunsthal Charlottenborg titled The Abstract Expression of Privatization debuting this summer in Copenhagen.

Credit
Hannibal Andersen (Artist)

SEMINAR AT MALMÖ ART MUSEUM 3 SEPTEMBER 2022

Welcome to a performative seminar on capitalism, power, and the role of art institutions. The program offers lectures and performances with artists, creators and researchers.

How has capitalism contributed to issues of otherness, structural exploitation, and global inequality? And how are these matters carried forward by the art institutions through generic commodification, neglected power relations, and anti-diversity?

Inspired by the themes from the Robin Hood mythos, the seminar Eat the Rich will focus on power relations in a multifaceted conversation on anti-capitalist ideas. Artists and other creatives will accompany researchers in a programme of intermingling lectures, and performances—aiming to make the seminar a creatively choreographed and engaging production.

PROGRAMME 3/9: Front Stage (open to the public) 

Location: Malmö Konstmuseum, Skovgaardsalen 

11.00 – 11.15: Welcome   

11.15 – 12.00: Franziska Hoppe (DK), screening of Physcics Envy & Portrætter (Portraits), performance   

12.00 – 12.20: Rana Dasgupta (IN/UK), dramatic reading by Özlem Sağlanmak (DK) 

12.20 – 13.05: Whose Museum (SE), performance  

13.05 – 13.35: Mette Riise (SE/DK), How to build an artist brand, the museum edition, artistic lecture  

Break – 13.35 – 14.30: Refreshments and performance by Francis Patrick Brady (UK/SE)   

14.30 – 15.00:  Tabita Rezaire (FR), screening of SORRY FOR REAL   

15.00 – 15.30: Hanni Kamaly (NO), performative lecture 

15.30 -16.00: Floating Museum (US), performative conversation  

16.00 – 16.30 Drinks and thank you w. Apparatus 22 (RO)  

The one-day seminar is free of charge, spoken language is English and registration is required. Please find the registration link here.

The seminar Eat the Rich is made in the framework of Museum Why?—a Nordic learning network consisting of a group of Nordic art museums. In recent years, art museums in the Nordic region have increasingly oriented their practices toward more socially sustainable notions of relevance, inclusion, and democratic participation. This welcome development poses a number of challenges to rethink the core functions and values of museums.

The seminar’s title “Eat the Rich” references to a political slogan associated with class conflict and anti-capitalism. The phrase is attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose political philosophy influenced the progress of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.

Credit
Tom Duncan

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / AFTERNOON SESSION 1.0

Dissecting Infrastructure – the spatial and digital interconnections between heritage and future by Tom Duncan

I am both practitioner and design researcher: I am a founding partner in the studio Duncan McCauley, a studio for museum planning and exhibition design, and am also completing a PhD at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. The studio is a place for creating, where the creative processes include thinking across borders towards spatial, social, and temporal qualities of the experiences of the visitor. My research is practice-centred, meaning that design practice is also research. Participative processes, together with the museum exhibition team, focus on the visitor experience centrally both in the design and in the related research. For example, my study of roleplaying workshop activities developed to predict visitor experiences and requirements inform how roleplaying as imagined visitors can be a valuable tool for the design process. Mapping the expectations, emotions, and requirements of imagined individual visitors enables a deeper engagement with the visitor experience at an early stage in the design process. This has enabled me to draw the visitor, beyond the scope of normal practice, into the design process.

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / AFTERNOON SESSION 1.0

Dissecting infrastructures in Berlin’s museumscape by Margareta von Oswald 

The stairs guiding to the exhibitions of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art in the Humboldt Forum, announcing their future opening, 21 April 2021, photograph: Margareta von Oswald. 

The title of the project ‘Museum Why’ reflects how museums are expected to radically transform at this particular moment in time – including what and who they are to serve, and which mission they are supposed to accomplish and fulfill. The museums involved in MuseumWhy are all institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art. My research has been mainly concerned with ethnological collections and the museums that house them. However, many of the challenges that ethnological museums are facing today – issues related to ownership and restitution; taxonomic order and the grappling with colonial namings and categories; representation and participation – appear in contemporary and modern art institutions as well, even if sometimes in less obvious, visible and legible terms. 

A standard definition of ‘to dissect’ describes it as a means ‘to identify and examine the basic elements or parts of (something) especially for discovering interrelationships’ (Merriam Webster online dictionary). ‘Dissecting infrastructures’, then, resonates with my own research practice. In my upcoming book, I use the notion of ‘working through’ in order to describe, but also to challenge the nitty-gritty, laborious, tiresome efforts of what it means to work through the colonial legacies of an established museum-institution, such as the Ethnological Museum in Berlin; and thus focusing, as in the definition of ‘dissecting’, on identifying, deconstructing, and examining the multiple relationships that hold the museum. 

The thoughts I contributed to the first session of the Afternoon session series stem from my engagement with the multiple relations between curatorial practice and anthropology; as a discipline both historically embedded in, as well as critical of colonial ideology. How can these disciplines with their own methodologies and histories learn from each other? How can they become even more relevant to one another? In my presentation, a key example of Berliner’s activism against the Humboldt Forum served as an entry point for my presentation to discuss the relationship between curatorial agency, anti-Humboldt Forum activism and the remembrance of German colonialism. I problematised the Humboldt Forum’s infrastructural settings and public attitude towards German colonialism at different moments in times, concluding that despite ongoing changes, its infrastructures continue to foster the Forum’s self-entitlement to represent cultures as Others (see image above). 

Credit
Margareta von Oswald

With the aim of creating an open and informal learning platform for sharing and discussing knowledge, Museum Why introduces the Afternoon Sessions – a new series of open-for-all webinars calling attention to specific concerns deriving from Museum Why’s three main focus areas; Infrastructure, Decoloniality and Sustainability. 

First Afternoon Session Dissecting infrastructure – the spatial and digital interconnections between heritage and future is scheduled on 3 February 2022, 2-4 pm UTC+1 and features presentations by M. Phil. and architect Tom Duncan, Post doc and anthropologist Margareta von Oswald and curator Matylda Krzykowski. Everyone is warmly welcome to join!

Credit
Ofri Cnaani

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST

This story begins with an error. In six short hours in September 2018 a fatal fire brought to an end two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s Museu Nacional. Only a handful of artifacts of the 20 million items that were housed at the museum survived this colossal disaster. To give a sense of perspective, the collection of the British Museum holds eight million items. 

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST

Speculations on Museum Why by Steffen Wellinger

Credit
Steffen Wellinger

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST

Aladdin’s Lamp and Art after the End of the Holocene: 1:1 Scale, Ecoaesthetics and Rewilding by Sebastian Cichocki

One of the classics of conceptual art, the Uruguayan artist of German origins Luis Camnitzer, a teacher and writer on education, likened the art world to an Aladdin’s lamps storage.We 1 collect, conserve and admire “vessels”, we view them in museums, contemplate their ornaments and forms. We can write the history of these objects, name the styles and tendencies. But what really interests us is the genie trapped inside a lamp or a bottle; we believe he is there with his superpowers. We have created a very sophisticated system of sustaining the belief in the existence of this spirit: museum edifices, frames and plinths, books and catalogues, specialist language, the cult of “geniuses”. This system may be extremely costly and energy-intensive. What’s more, it requires specialist knowledge and (fittingly for a cult) an appropriate degree of initiation. Art would therefore be something of “handicraft+”, although it is difficult to determine, without sliding into esotericism, what hides behind the mysterious “plus”. 

Credit
Sebastian Cichocki

DAY 2 – INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST

ENGLISH

Featuring
Signe Meisner Christensen, Apparatus 22 (workshop), and Kati Kivinen (final remarks)

SEMINAR 25-26 NOVEMBER 2021 AT TRONDHEIM KUNSTMUSEUM

A for accessability C for communication C for community H for health N for necessities O for operation P for play P for politics P for product P for presence P for participation R for repository S for surprise T for trust T for thing T for together V for value Z for zzzzz

Through a programme of lectures, workshops and discussions the seminar Towards a Future Museum Glossary: A for Ability, T for Trust aims to help museums and their audiences speak about the museum, its duties and purpose in the future, and to better understand their respective roles and the basis of their interaction.
The starting point for the seminar is a desire to initiate a performance of a new vocabulary for the museum of the future, a vocabulary that adapts to the needs of both the institution and the general public.

See the full programme and get tickets here

The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea.