NETWORK DAY MUSEUM WHY & PASS

This seminar, hosted by Museum Why? in collaboration with PASS Center for Practice-based Art Studies, brought together voices from across the Nordic art world to explore the evolving role of art institutions in society. Held in November 2024, the event revisited themes from the May 2024 Museum Why? conference, expanding on critical discussions around care, co-creation, commoning, cultural accessibility, and community engagement.

The day began with two panels that examined how art institutions can redefine their purpose and practices by engaging deeply with the communities they serve. 

The first panel, ‘Elevating Social Aspects Outside the Institution’, focused on how grassroots and community-driven projects can address social inequality and foster accessibility beyond institutional walls. Speakers Louise Lassen Iversen (Til Vægs), Matthias Borello (The Maria Project), and Frederik Rørmann (UKK Art Workers with Disabilities) shared insights on placeguarding, integrating social ethics into artistic practice, and mapping accessibility barriers within the art world.

The second panel, ‘Institutions and Social Engagement’, turned the spotlight on the potential of art institutions to embrace socially sustainable models of engagement. The conversation centered on practices of hosting, resource sharing, and fostering horizontal, inclusive communities. Presenters Annette Skov (Nitja Center for Contemporary Art, CC, SMK and more), Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen (Astrid Noack’s Atelier & PASS), and Xenia Brown Pallesen (UCPH) offered diverse perspectives, from building institutional-community connections to learning from commoning-oriented art experiments and expanding participatory practices in art dissemination.

The seminar concluded with a keynote by Maria Hlavajova, titled ‘Instituting Otherwise, or, Navigating Toward the Not-Yet‘. Hlavajova explored the notion of “instituting otherwise” as a process of reimagining and reordering institutions in response to current global challenges. Drawing on her experience with the project Trainings for the Not-Yet at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, she discussed the potential of art to disrupt extractivist and racial capitalist systems while creating spaces for collective learning, relational ethics, and social and ecological justice. Her keynote provided a speculative yet grounded vision of art’s capacity to shape futures of togetherness.

The seminar highlighted how rethinking traditional institutional structures can lead to more equitable and resonant cultural spaces. By examining the intersections of art, community, and accessibility, the event encouraged participants to envision art institutions as dynamic platforms for collective belonging and social transformation.

THE ART INSTITUTION AS AN EXPANDED SOCIAL FIELD

Following the Museum Why conference, organised in collaboration with PASS, we are pleased to announce a one-day follow-up program under the headline The Museum as an Expanded Social Field. This event will explore critical questions that emerged, include more perspectives, and give attention to discussions that may not have been fully explored, with a particular focus on the social aspects of art and the art institution. The program will feature two panels and a keynote, offering further opportunities to engage with the ideas and debates sparked during the conference.

Register for the seminar.

LEAVING THE MUSEUM AS WE KNOW IT

‘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.

The program included international thinkers and practitioners to share both reflections and concrete cases and aimed to create an open space for exchange and discussion around these exciting themes and ongoing institutional developments.

SEMINAR ROSKILDE

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 lie 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?

PROGRAM
10.00: Leaving the museum – about exploring
new places and ways of being a
museum by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen

10.30: The museum is larger than its building
– and what that actually means by
Magdalena Malm

11.30: How to stop growing up: from artist-run
space to professional museum by
Evelyn Raudsepp

14.50: Contemporary Art taking care – a conversation
between Christian Skovbjerg
Jensen and Tom van Gestel

15.30: MUSEUM FICTIONS – a performative
lecture by Kilobase Bucharest
(Dragos Olea & Sandra Demetrescu)

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.

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.

WHOSE MUSEUM

Whose Museum invited the Museum Why group to partake in a dynamic workshop based on their ongoing work with collections. Founded in 2008, Whose Museum is an art collective and loose archival network that began in Vancouver with a mission to challenge traditional notions of what a museum is and can be. In this workshop, participants explored how collections can serve as catalysts for social exchange and artistic collaboration.

At Whose Museum, everything bureaucratic becomes ornamental, discarded items gain new value, and the only straightforward aspect is the donation itself—anyone can donate anything. The workshop allowed the Museum Why group to engage directly with this open collection, which features contributions ranging from the banal to the bizarre: drawings, discarded objects, prosthetic body parts, plants, songs, and ephemera. Through this process, the collection became a springboard for conversation and creative exchange among participants, as they examined the ways in which collections can break away from institutional hierarchies and embrace a more inclusive and participatory approach. Apparatus 22 also contributed with a bubbly collective performance outside the spaces of Whose Museum.

CREDIT
Whose Museum

1. if i could dust off your thousand treasures and water them. A collectively-voiced document by museum directors, curators, and artists from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Romania, United Kingdom and Singapore. Through a conversation facilitated by Sheralynne Dollatella-Wong Jia (Salty Xi Jie Ng) for the EAT THE RICH seminar

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

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 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.

CREDIT
Salty Xi Jie Ng aka Sheralynne Dollatella-Wong Jia

LABORATORT FOR METAPHORS BY FRANZISKA HOPPE

Artist Franziska Hoppe hosted a Laboratory for Metaphors workshop for the Museum Why partners. This two-hour session focused on the metaphors used to describe the economic system, emphasizing how these metaphors shape our understanding of the economy and influence what we can conceive and perceive. The workshop underscored the importance of critically examining the metaphors we rely on—both past and present—and explored alternative ways to reimagine these concepts.

CREDIT
Franziska Hoppe

SHARING PERSPECTIVES BY DORTE BJERRE JENSEN

Dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and researcher Dorte Bjerre Jensen challenged the traditional concept of the White Cube through the performative score Sharing Perspectives. By introducing a set of shared instructions for improvisation, Sharing Perspectives created a choreography that explored interconnection and togetherness, disrupting habitual ways of moving through art institutions and their surrounding spaces.

This participatory, performative score emerged from the art/science research collaboration Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting, a project involving researchers and artists from the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin.

CREDIT
Dorte Bjerre Jensen

MONUMENTS OF SUBURBIA BY MINNA HENRIKSSON

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

DEAR SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM ACQUISITION COMMITTEE BY SALTY XI JIE NG

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.

ART IN SAXO BANK: AN INFORMAL MEETING BY HANNIBAL ANDERSEN

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

EAT THE RICH – A SEMINAR ON CAPITALISM, POWER, AND THE ROLE OF THE ART INSTITUTION

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
Front Stage (open to the public) 

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)  

LOCATION:
Malmö Konstmuseum, Skovgaardsalen 

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

DISSECTING INFRASTRUCTURE BY TOM DUNCAN

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / AFTERNOON SESSION 1.0

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.

Read full contribution…

DISSECTING INFRASTRUCTURE IN BERLIN’S MUSEUMSCAPE BY MARGARETA VON OSWALD

ONLINE CONTRIBUTION / AFTERNOON SESSION 1.0 

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

CIVICIZE INSTITUTIONS – OR HOW TO NURTURE A PUBLIC-SPIRITED PLACE? BY MATYLDA KRZYKOWSKI

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.

Read full contribution…

AFTERNOON SESSION 1.0

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

MUSEUMS AND ITS AFTERNESS BY 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. 

Read full contribution…

SPECULATIONS ON MUSEUM WHY BY STEFFEN WELLINGER

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

See full presentation…

CREDIT
Steffen Wellinger

ALADDIN’S LAMP AND ART AFTER THE END OF THE HOLOCENE BY SEBASTIAN CICHOCKI

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

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”. 

Read full contribution…

CREDIT
Sebastian Cichocki

TOWARDS A FUTURE MUSEUM GLOSSARY: A FOR ABILITY, T FOR TRUST

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.