CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
“DREAM” MAKES A GIDDY SOUND
Presentation by Floating Museum. Keynote chaired by Anne Thomasen.
CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
“DREAM” MAKES A GIDDY SOUND
Presentation by Floating Museum. Keynote chaired by Anne Thomasen.
CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
INSTITUTIONS OF RESISTANCE
Presentations by Lara Khaldi and Rebeka Polsdam followed by a conversation with Line Ellegaard. Panel convened by Museum Why? partner institutions.
CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
ART MUSEUMS FOR THE FUTURE: MUSEUM WHY?
Presentations by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen (Museet for Samtidskunst, DK), Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg (Malmö Konstmuseum, SE), Marianne Zamecznik (Trondheim Kunstmuseum, NO) and Saara Hacklin (Kiasma, FI). Panel chaired by Nanna Balslev Strøjer.
CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
Introduction by conference organizers postdoc Rasmus Holmboe (DK), curator Nanna Balslev Strøjer (DK) and professor Mikkel Bogh (DK).
MUSEUM WHAT? HOW? WHO? WHERE? WHEN?
In late May 2024, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and artists met at the University of Copenhagen to discuss the past, present, and future of museum practices. With a starting point in what the conference organizers described as a museum crossroads, the conference was to discuss the challenging questions of “why we have art museums and how we might create more impactful, inclusive, and relevant institutions”. Throughout the conference, a plenitude of suggested answers – and critiques of them – came from around 50 speakers. Though one could argue that museums have always been at various crossroads, ICOM’s new museum definition revitalizes the question of museums’ role, significance and responsibility in society. Similarly, wars and crises around the globe call for new forms of action from public museums, and the current wars in Ukraine and Palestine were among the many points of references across the conference presentations.
The conference made evident that it is impossible to talk about the art museum and instead presented a plethora of understandings, visions, and dreams for art museums. Just a brief look at the museum network Museum Why? – one of the organizers of the conference – shows the breadth of art museums and the many crossroads they face. The ambition of the network is sharing and developing new perspectives on the art museum of the 21st century. In a panel with the network partners, director at Museet for Samtidskunst (DK) Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, Chief Curator at Trondheim Kunstmuseum (NO) Marianne Zamecznik, Chief Curator of Collections, Kiasma (FI), Saara Hacklin, and director at Malmö Konstmuseum (SE) Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg presented their institutional challenges: From the maintenance, accessibility, and expansion of large collections (Kiasma and Trondheim Kunstmuseum) to being a museum without a physical site (Museet for Samtidskunst) and the constant task of meeting new audiences (Malmö Konstmuseum).
In many ways, it is just as impossible to grasp the everything of a conference in a few pages as it is to describe the everything of art museums in a single conference. The following pages will, however, try to give an outline of the three days of generous research dissemination, practice presentations, and discussions.
INSTITUTIONAL FLIP-FLOPPING
Curator, artist, writer, and educator Dr. Paul O’Neill opened the conference with the rhetorical question: “What if we already know what we can and must do?” In other words, what if we already have the models for more inclusive, ethically viable, and artistically interesting institutions and only lack the method of how to implement the models? O’Neill’s own suggestion is so-called “institutional flip-flopping”, or what he terms “para-hosting”. “Para-hosting” is a playful approach to diverting the guest-host paradigm of museums in which the museum becomes the guest by letting other agents in the art field take over their institutions as hosts. In this way, small-scale institutions that are working with new, processual ways of curating can affect established museums and institutions.
The radical “flip-flopping” that O’Neill proposed pointed to the delicate question of how to translate critical knowledge into changed practices across institutional scales, and “para-hosting” became a recurrent reference point at the conference. At the last keynote, associate professor and artist Martha Fleming concluded with reference to O’Neill’s term:
“There is in this room a huge body of knowledge. We know enough, we know how to bring about radical change. But this knowledge is not being articulated fully, it is not published or shared in a coordinated and accessible way. It is not evaluated in a way that encourages institutions to take it up and operationalize it. […] We will need to get to the point where we are both hosts and guests, and in fact we are all hosts and guests.”
Fleming’s keynote focused on artists working inside museums and on museums as places of both employment and collaborative resistance. From listening to O’Neill and Fleming’s keynotes, it became clear that there seems to be a challenge in making knowledge from artists, curators, and smaller exhibition venues accessible to museums at large. The work of changing the institutions on a smaller scale is happening “out there” as they both could show, yet the larger structural changes are still needed.
REMOVE US FROM MEMORY
In a panel on “Institutions of Resistance”, research fellow at the University of Tartu Rebeka Põldsam discussed the museum landscape in Estonia and in particular the Kumu Art Museum’s response to crisis, wars, and social tensions. Whereas the museum has, in recent years, re-examined nationalist projects and increased a focus on colonial history, feminism, and queer empowerment in the exhibition program, the museum’s approach to current conflicts is more blurred. Põldsam highlighted, among other things, the divergence in the museum’s reactions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Whereas Kumu’s website stated “Stop the war” in relation to the former, the museum has not made any public announcements in connection to the latter. This discrepancy points to the questions of who a national museum represents, and who they are intended for, as Põldsam reminded the audiences.
Following Põldsam’s presentation, curator, artist, and artistic director of de Appel Lara Khaldi presented her article “We’re still alive, so remove us from memory. Asynchronicity and the Museum in Resistance”. The article is part of Khaldi’s research book The Impossible Museum: Palestinian Museums and Renegade Objects (2021). With Khaldi’s presentation, the focus shifted from the existing (national) museums to the impossible museums such as those of Palestine and their potential for resistance:
“The museum in resistance is not as we imagine: a material structure and archive of a past struggle of emancipation. It is rather the generative collective disintegration of this material in the struggle for forging collective myths. The museum in resistance is a museum outside of time, as time is always controlled by the hegemonic power. It is a museum which does not reserve a record nor a trace, but rather a shared knowledge in continuous circulation and transformation” (Khaldi 2021, 29).
These museums in resistance are not the old, classical buildings but in the actions and collective initiatives that resist hegemonic power; they resist historicizing (memory) by saying: “we’re still alive”.
Khaldi and Põldsam’s presentations thus also addressed urgent questions for the site of the conference. At the University of Copenhagen’s City Campus, Students Against the Occupation raised a tent camp on May 6 2024 to protest, among other things, the university’s investments in companies engaged in the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Only a few hundred meters from the conference, on the South Campus, there was a smaller solidarity camp, and several of the activists attended Khaldi and Põldsam’s presentations. Likewise, the organizers of the conference made solidarity statements with the pro-Palestinian protests.
In general, the entanglement of museums and politics was a recurring theme throughout the conference. This was evident from two panels loosely structured around art museums and colonial histories. In one panel, researcher Anders Kold Nielsen addressed antiracist exhibition practices in Aotearoa; independent curator and PhD candidate Ginerva Ludovici discussed the work with colonial history in Italian museums and in particular at the Museum of Civilizations in Rome; and curator, researcher, and art historian Lucas Stübbe provided examples of not showing, or partially veiling, sensitive cultural objects in German museums. Together, the papers provided hands-on examples of how museums can work with difficult histories and objects. In another panel, artist and researcher Benazir Basauri Torres asked for radical care practices in artist-museum encounters; postdoctoral researcher Vibe Nielsen unfolded debates around diversity and inclusion at the Iziko South African National Gallery’s Our Lady exhibition (2016); and postdoctoral researcher Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen examined the Danish national gallery’s obligation (or lack thereof) to collect and exhibit art from the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
A DRIFTING MUSEUM
The conference also presented two performance lectures. Thereby, some of the artists that many of the presentations addressed implicitly (at least those addressing contemporary art museums) were also generously included in the conference. The transdisciplinary art collective Apparatus 22 that works between Brussels, Bucharest and SUPRAINFINIT utopian universe presented the works How close to hold the Mirror? and A most amazing offer. In the first, the audiences were asked to vote on answers to questions such as “Which words should be forbidden when evaluating collections of a museum?” (they could choose between the answers “asset, efficiency, harmony, forever, iconic, and investment”). The poll made space for a much needed laugh (and some head shaking) at the conference. In the second work, audiences were offered the acquisition of Apparatus 22’s work, but with two prices: a standard price and a discounted price where the museum committed to for example improving the conditions for artists working in the museum.
Another performance lecture was given by two of the American art collective Floating Museums’ founders: poet, songwriter and performer avery r. young and architect Andrew Schachman. Floating Museum is designed to challenge traditional ideas of museums and in accordance with its floating character the art collective both hosts other initiatives, groups, and artist and is hosted by other institutions, museums, and infrastructures. In the first part of Floating Museum’s performance lecture, young reversed the roles of the audience and himself by letting the audience perform a choreography and read the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool” (1959) aloud. In the second part, Schachman discussed how to remain critical while simultaneously taking responsibility for the recognized and established institution Floating Museum has become.
MUSEUMS BEYOND COLLECTIONS
Throughout the conference’s many presentations, there was an acknowledgement of museums as spaces for a wide range of publics. In some panels, the question of “museum for who?” remained implicit, while the question of publics was addressed directly in others. In one panel, photographer and cultural practitioner Carlos Santos; PhD fellow Anna Provst, and PhD fellow Zenia Brown Pallesen presented papers on the important meeting between museum and (diverse) audiences. Their cases included: tensions between the skateboarding community of the Stephan Hessel Platz in Weimar and the Bauhaus the Museum; strategies of the future Vildmosemuseum in Brønderslev, Denmark; and how the habitual flows of interpretations and meaning, presented by the art institution, can influence dissemination practices and the audiences’ orientation.
The focus on publics call for a critical reexamination of collections as the raison d’etre of museums. This point was made by PhD fellow and curator Magnus Kaslov who discussed the problem of prioritizing collections and suggested that “museums are what they have platformed, not what they collect”. In other words, we risk overlooking important aspects of museums in the forms of performances, interventions, and events, if we only consider museums to be houses for collections.
In general, the conference presented a plenitude of topics, themes, and cases organized in keynotes, a partner’s panel, group panels, and individual paper presentations. Among the plurality of voices and the many suggestions presented for the future of museums, Benazir Basauri Torres proposed on the closing day of the conference that the collectivity of the conference attendees decided on one specific action to change museums. This request for a concrete outcome of the conference was left hanging in the air, and perhaps, there is a point in not choosing one answer to fit all museums. As the organizers Rasmus Holmboe, Nanna Balslev Strøjer, and Mikkel Bogh concluded in their final remarks: the museums need to stay in the conflicts. Despite the existing knowledge that was made available by both keynotes and paper presentations, there are no easy answers to the question of “Museum why?”. In fact, the “why” includes at least a “what?”, a “how?”, a “who?”, and a “where?” These are big questions, and it seems fit that the conference was the closing conference for the Museum Why? network and the opening conference for the Center for Practice-based Art Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
By Marie Finsten Jensen and Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen, Copenhagen, July 2024
Museum Why? Practice, Agency and Knowledge in the Art Museum took place from May 22 to May 24, 2024. The conference was a collaboration between the Nordic Art Museum Network, Museum Why? and PASS – The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen. Museum Why? is formed by Museet for Samtidskunst (DK), Malmö Konstmuseum (SE), Trondheim Kunstmuseum (NO), and Kiasma (FI) in collaboration with University of Copenhagen’s Research Centre Art as Forum (DK). The conference was organized by Rasmus Holmboe, Christian Hald Foghmar, Nanna Balslev Strøjer, Mikkel Bogh, Niels Christian Dinesen, and Marie Dyssel Stets.
MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM
The conference, “Museum Why? Practice, Agency and Knowledge in the Art Museum,” seeks to deepen our understanding of the constellation of art production, audience commitment, and museum operations. We invite contributions that delve into these practices as a heterogeneous yet entangled set, characterized by numerous, often overlapping, competing, and sometimes contradictory interests, agencies, and power relations.
KEY QUESTIONS
– How can we rethink knowledge production in the art museums of the future?
– How do artistic practices navigate, challenge, and change institutional infrastructures?
– How can increasingly diverse publics be reflected in and by museum practices?
– How can we rethink the unifying logics of preservation, archive, and collection?
– How can museum dissemination reflect contemporary ideas of representation?
– How can museums become critical, relevant, and significant actors in their communities?
– How can we diversify knowledges, historical analyses, and creative thinking?
– How can we co-create and integrate museum knowledge and academic scholarship?
PROPOSAL
Please submit your abstract proposal (max 250 words) and a short bio (max 50 words) to pass@hum.ku.dk no later than March 8, 2024. We welcome academic papers and artists’ and practitioners’ presentations (20 mins), as well as group panels (90 mins). Notification of acceptance no later than March 22, 2024.
MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM
“Museum Why? Practice, Agency and Knowledge in the Art Museum,” seeks to deepen our understanding of the constellation of art production, audience commitment, and museum operations. Art museums stand at a crossroads, grappling with dynamic challenges and transformative demands that emanate both from within and beyond their traditional confines. In the current landscape, external political and economic pressures are reshaping the objectives of these institutions. Simultaneously, the ever-evolving landscape of artistic production is prompting the reevaluation and reorientation of established museum practices.
Full programme and registration date to be announced on pass.ku.dk and the Museum Why website.
‘Leaving the museum, as we know it’ was 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 was held in one the most famous hospital buildings, Kurhuset, from 1860, and a guided tour of the exhibition ‘Non Performing’ was part of the programme.
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.
INFO
Kurshussalen, Sankt Hans Hospital, Kurhusvænge 3, 4000 Roskilde. Lunch, coffee and cake is included in the price. The seminar is in english
Ticket & lunch: 100 kr.
Student ticket & lunch: 50 kr.
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.
2. Handout for workshop with questions for museum directors, curators, and artists regarding acquisition of social forms of art
3. Recommended Methods for Collecting Social Forms of Art. Developed through conversations with museum directors, curators and artists while on residence at Singapore Art Museum, 2021
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 reimagining 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.
SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / EAT THE RICH (ENG)
Presentations by Tabita Rezaire (FR), Hanni Kamaly (NO), Floating Museum (US), Apparatus 22 (RO)
SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / EAT THE RICH (ENG)
Presentations by 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)
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
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.
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
CREDIT
Matylda Kzykowski
A SHORT, OVERDUE SUMMARY OF A LONG STORY THAT WILL BE CONTINUED
In 2021 I co-curated the exhibition Institution Building at CIVA, an architecture and culture museum in Brussels. The exhibition was not ready when we opened, instead it grew over the course of eight weeks. We first started with an empty exhibition space and each Thursday added exhibits around a specific theme: Hospitality, Format, Collection, Audience, Agency, Pedagogy, Emancipation, Environment, Preservation, and Idiom. For each opening we invited a handful of people—most of them practitioners, some of them citizens, many of whom we got to know in these eight weeks—to speak about projects or works that were being exhibited.
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
SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST (ENG)
DAY 2 – INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Presentations by Signe Meisner Christensen, Apparatus 22 (workshop), and Kati Kivinen (final remarks).
SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST (ENG)
DAY 1 – PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE / USER PERSPECTIVE
Presentations by Ofri Cnaani and Apparatus 22.
SEMINAR DOCUMENTATION / TOWARDS A FUTURE GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST (ENG)
DAY 1 – PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE / USER PERSPECTIVE
The formats of contemporary art institutions are lumbered with a number of serious shortcomings: exaggeration, extravagance, competitiveness, elitism, overproduction, pomposity and wastefulness. As opposed to this, the practices of artists engaged in generating social change are focused on daily chores, unheroic and unspectacular and not always resulting in a tangible work of art, often escaping the institutional radar; migrating – whether of their own desire or due to necessity – beyond the art world. When dealing with the pitfalls of contemporary art, we must bear in mind the freedom of art, including the freedom to cease being what it is supposed to be. Sometimes this is related to returning to more compromised or historically marginalised forms such as propaganda. After all, every work that persuades us of something, be it a form of aesthetics, an opinion, a pleasure or an unpleasurable experience is a form of propaganda. Today more than ever before, we need the art of propaganda to act on behalf of minority rights, women’s reproductive rights and the well-being of our natural environment and other species. The extravagant costume of contemporary art often constrains movement and impedes the ability to deliver a well-aimed blow.
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.
The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea.