During PUBLICS’ symposium Positioning in Helsinki, Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, Evelyn Raudsepp, and Anne Thomasen contributed to the program with a conversation engaged in how the act of questioning can shape curatorial and institutional practices, and how collaboration unfolds shaped by, and extending beyond, our ecologies.

Anne: The Museum Why network started in 2020, built around ideas of rethinking institutional change through collaborative experiments that challenges our current norms. Since our founding the network has critically assessed the changing role of art institutions in society, stressing the need for more democratic and ecological values. We function as a collective institutional mobilisation working with non-institutional practitioners, primarily artists, in rethinking and reshaping our art institutions.

Our collective work is directly motivated by the processes of change that the partner institutions are undergoing. Today the network consists of PASS Center for Practice-based Art Studies (DK), Henie Onstad Art Center (NO), PUBLICS (FI), EKKM (EE), The Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde (DK) and Malmö Art Museum (SE).

Over the past five years of working together, through local symposia and collective residencies, one thing has become very clear: the real work of our network isn’t only to elevate conversations on change but to put that change into practice, in how we curate and how we institute. And that’s exactly where the hard work begins.

But challenges are part of how we grow. That’s why, through our upcoming programs, collective residencies, commissions and publications, we’ll be focusing on finding concrete ways to implement the ideas we’ve been addressing drawing on both interdisciplinary and interprofessional perspectives. Also, we’re committed to strengthening collaboration — both within our network and with our external partners. We find both nuance and strength in the plural - in doing things together. Our hope is to foster a more dialogical and collective networked approach that connects all parts of our organizations, not just management and curatorial, and engages our local communities while continuing to build strong relationships with colleagues internationally.

In a time of growing polarization, where wars and genocides are allowed to continue, and where critical voices are systematically silenced, we have to ask: what role can art institutions play as active and critical forces in society? And how can these institutions reflect on their own practices and positions to transform in response to what is needed to create change?

The work of the Museum Why members taking part in today’s conversation, EKKM and the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, offers concrete examples of how institutions are learning and evolving through both organizational resistance and physical transformation. Evelyn and Christian, as an entrance to our conversation, I will invite both of you to share some words about your institutions.

Evelyn: To introduce EKKM, it must always start from the beginning — as its origins established a very distinct attitude and built a legacy to which we are still strongly attached. The building where EKKM still operates today is a small, unrenovated administrative house that once belonged to a large power plant. It was constructed sometime in the 1950s, during the Soviet era, and had been abandoned for years before artists began squatting there in 2006, declaring it the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM).

The motivation behind this manifesting attitude was the closure of one of Tallinn’s main contemporary art exhibition halls and the opening of the new Kumu Museum in 2006 — a somewhat confused mix of a national gallery and a modern art museum. As the title “Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art” was still available, they simply claimed it.

During the first few years, EKKM operated illegally and without funding, sustained only by great enthusiasm and creative survival tactics. When curator Anders Härm joined, the museum got the direction towards a white-cube-ish contemporary art institution with a strong international programme.

Now, after almost 20 years, with many changes in the team and the founders now serving more symbolic roles on the board — and with modest but stable government funding — EKKM has become an organic part of Tallinn’s art scene. It stands as a kind of last lighthouse in a now heavily gentrified area, maintaining its role as a non-commercial space. EKKM continues to navigate this hybrid-model, oscillating between artist-run-space mentality and self-institutionalising museum.

Christian: Our museum was established out of both a need and a dream to create a museum for the more problematic formats of contemporary art – the ephemeral, hybrid/cross-disciplinary and time-based formats in contemporary art, the performative, sonic. So, from the start the museum had a very open and experimental approach to how to be a museum, and why – this manifested itself in the way of collecting things that were not traditional art objects, but instructions/texts/recordings/archives, and also often reaching out beyond the traditional museum space. This playful legacy has been played out differently by shifting directors and curators over time, but after operating 30 years in a beautiful former royal mansion but also well protected (in terms of architectural heritage) and therefore also badly suited for contemporary art the museum took the bold decision to leave their permanent building. Not to find a new one, but to work without one.

So today we operate as nomads and inhabit existing sites and places through close collaborations and – as guests and hosts at the same time in our temporary venues. We want to be an agile and curious museum that entangle ourselves with others. Our first strategic move as a nomadic museum was a collaboration with the municipality to do a three-year exhibition programme focusing on care and mental health in a former psychiatric hospital in Roskilde, that will be transformed into a recreative neighbourhood in a near future.

On this journey, the network has been a very practical and useful constellation, where we could exchange learnings and challenges in a direct and honest way while creating a space for discussions that reflect on our core questions with someone else than ourselves.

QUESTIONING AS PRACTICE

Anne: Our following conversation is grounded in the idea of questioning as a method for institutional transformation. Within Museum Why, we see curating not just as exhibition-making, but as a way of instituting - of reimagining structures, relationships, and ways of working.

Malmö Art Museum is in the process of relocating from a Renaissance castle to a former casino in Kungsparken in Malmö. We see this move as more than just a change of address but as a chance to rethink and reorganise the institutional structures that confine us today. Over the coming years, before we officially open the new museum in 2029, we have been granted access to our coming space, where we’re working actively with local citizens and communities, the independent cultural scene, other organisations and institutions and academia to foster collective conversation on ways to organise Malmö Art Museum differently in the future.

Evelyn, both through EKKMs involvement with Museum Why and in other contexts, you and I have discussed ideas around the balance between impermanence and professionalism. How do you navigate this work at EKKM?

Evelyn: These types of artist-run initiatives, founded on enthusiasm, were almost never meant to last long; yet somehow, we have managed to perform and play the role of a museum quite successfully – with funding and international collaborations increasing, and plans for renovating the building now in progress.

EKKM has, from the beginning, been self-instituting – incorporating many features of a normative public institution, yet actively seeking ways to remain critical of those same norms and conventions, with the aim of imagining an alternative form of institutionality.

As the current team, however, we need to be careful when negotiating between self-instituting and self-institutionalising. This means that as the conditions of the museum improve, we must consciously work to define the artist-run-space mentality we value and want to preserve. It is a daily exercise, an ongoing practice, with questioning as its central method.

One of the aspects we try to incorporate into our everyday work environment is collective and horizontal working. Although areas of responsibility are divided, we strive to think of EKKM as a holistic entity — fostering a sense of ownership and shared responsibility for how the museum operates, develops, and evolves. This relationship becomes more organic when the practices of artists and curators working in the museum align as closely as possible with the museum’s identity, and vice versa. It’s a bilateral relationship — not about serving the institution or merely filling a container with content, but about using the institutional infrastructure as an active tool and means for creative thinking. In this way, the institution can truly act as a verb — instituting.

Anne: Through our conversations the issue of space keeps up coming up. Evelyn, EKKM has been fighting to stay in their building, while struggling finding resources to maintain it. This challenge has in itself grown into a practice. Christian, in 2021 the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde left its building in the central part of Roskilde, to work nomadically. What has happened to the institution in this process – in this questioning of the importance of a building?

Christian: I started as director a year after the move out of the building, so everything was very new and there was no real plan or strategy of where and how the museum would unfold itself. Everything happened rather quickly, especially after the former director decided to leave in the middle of the process of coming out with this brand-new profile. So, the first task was to answer the many questions surrounding this new situation. No, we would not become a fully digital museum, or a public art museum. Instead, we presented the idea of focusing and digging deeper into one place and context at a time, starting with the psychiatric hospital. This has proven to be an interesting approach to accumulate knowledge of a place, history and topic. But we also learned other things along the way. One is that it is a lot more complicated to work in direct dependence of others – although we also want this, there are a lot of negotiations and compromises. But worse was that we realized that the organisation - or museum body, if you will - had been dislocated, into pieces that were not really connected anymore. When the museum moved it established an office in a small container office space, too small, and hidden behind other cultural practitioners that we have very little in common with. Nobody can find us here. Our library is loaned out to a school nearby and our precious archive is in another school basement, close but still detached. Our collection is in two storage spaces with other museums. So, now we are in a process of repairing this malfunction by trying to place ourselves, the museum in a more visible place in the city, in the public, with a clearer base from where we can communicate and host things ourselves. We also plan to take the archive and our library back to establish a stronger and more sustainable base and foundation from where we can distribute our knowledge and projects to make it accessible to others. So the need and importance of a physical building has proven itself to be strong after all, but it has (or will have) little to do with a traditional museum space, and we are now trying to define what it is then – a museum building or foundation, that is not a museum in a traditional way, but something else, a middle way.

COLLABORATING ECOLOGIES

Anne: Both in the Museum Why network, and at our institutions, collaboration is at the center. But what do we actually mean, when we say that we collaborate? Collaboration can take many forms and happen at many different scales. But instead of taking the act for granted, we need to question: what iscollaboration, in practice? What forms, and informs, collaboration? What makes collaboration meaningful, subjective I know, but none the less? And how can we find new ways of engaging within and beyond our ecologies?

In Malmö, we're currently in the process of identifying the different forms and states of collaboration we engage in. By doing this, we hope to build a deeper awareness of how we work together and to develop new methods and approaches that can shape the foundation of our future space. Evelyn, at EKKM you approach collaboration in a way that seems orientated by the institutions attitude of being, or maybe rather remaining, in process. How have the collaborative ecologies around EKKM evolved in extension of this?

Evelyn: We prefer not to declare ourselves independent; rather, we admit and cherish the co-dependency and interdependency. So, we remain open and available for collaborations, and we actively seek them out. At the same time, collaboration, for us, means partnership — where both sides are equal participants, where collaborators know who we are, what we value, and under what conditions we operate.

As a space for artists, we have collaborated closely with the art academy and students — being for the artists from the very beginning. But we are also a space for curators: working with freelance curators and providing a platform for daring curatorial practices with strong authorship.

In recent years, we also collaborate with Tallinn city closely, positioning ourselves as an active agent in shaping the (gentrifying) area around us. We see EKKM not only in public space, but as public space.

And being part of networks, such as Museum Why, is so valuable and important for us — it allows us to stay in close dialogue with international institutional developments, to question, and to test out new ideas of instituting.

Anne: Christian, since the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde currently do not have a permanent physical space, you’ve been collaborating extensively with other organisation and institutions. How has this influenced or changed your approach to collaboration? And has this, playful, situation also had an impact on the museum’s curatorial methods?

Christian: Well, a lot of things has changed for us in relation to both spaces and ways of working. One aspect is that you realize that you are nothing without collaborations and someone else, which is exactly what we want – to partner with other institutions, spaces, networks, communities and someone to go into dialogue with. Without the fixed museum arena for our exhibition programme, we need to establish and situate something new every time. This is hard work and the reason why our model only works through great and solid collaborations.

Another aspect, which is more ironic, is that you become rather obsessed with spaces and buildings, when you don’t have one of your own. I am constantly looking for vacant and potentially interesting spaces when I walk or bike through the city. I often meet up with real estate agents, and I try to subvert the market value discourse and logic with our unique nomadic contemporary art capital.

In terms of our curatorial thinking and methods, which is for us integrated into all elements of shaping of our institution, our organisation and our collaborations, so it’s hard to differentiate. But our collaborative work in and around the former psychiatric hospital has indeed influenced our ways of curating immensely. Of course other museums work with themes and series, but I think that our approach to accumulating knowledge about a place and give ourselves the opportunity to dwell with these questions, in this context care and mental health, has been fantastic from a curatorial and artistic perspective. Not many institutions can stay with a set of questions like we have.

Our three years at the psychiatric hospital has gone too fast. Now we are considering if we can stay and integrate this place into our future DNA, or just as a longer strand than the three years or how to move on and leave this place for something else.

Anne: Thank you both for sharing your work and processes so honestly. I think a lot of these questions are worth returning to, again and again, if we want to move beyond the surface and ensure that we stay critical to our own institutional practices and development. I’m curious to continue our work in the Museum Why constellation and see how the practices of our institutions, especially the new members, will shape the network. And in turn, how the work we do collectively within the network, will shape our institutions.