This symposium, featuring a series of individual presentations followed by a panel discussion, offers a discursive platform for the questions raised by the ambitious exhibition project that WIELS presents this summer: The Absent Museum.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Banner, 2017, 390 x 840 cm, spray paint on cloth. Specific installation for WIELS. Photo © Kristien Daem
The speakers are invited to discuss their experience of elaborating different examples of museum practices. With examples from within Europe and the world at large, they all face tensions between identity and tradition, heightened by transnational displacement and disruptive technologies. What is to be done when long-standing polarizing and simplistic conceptions such as “the West and the rest,” centre and periphery, or high and low have proved inadequate when defining contemporary urgencies? Which institutional methodologies can be proposed to address the issues of a multiple or global modernity? How can existing art museums actively position themselves in the cultural debate and overcome a binary representation of history in favour of nuance and complexity?
In the light of recent discussions around the future foundation of an institution for contemporary art in Brussels, the European capital, what is at stake is the development of tools for negotiating, translating and mediating an open, cosmopolitan and egalitarian place for art, culture and ideas.
Programme
Lectures at WIELS:
14:00–14:30: Introductory notes by Dirk Snauwaert
Director, WIELS, Brussels
14:30–15:15: Catherine David
Deputy Director, Centre Pompidou, Paris
15:30–16:15: Elvira Dyangani Ose
Senior Curator, Creative Time, NYC; Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London; Member of Thought Council, Fondazione Prada
16:30–17:15: Marta Dziewańska
Curator, Head of Research, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Curatorial Advisor, documenta 14, Kassel
Moderated by Zoë Gray, Senior Curator, WIELS, Brussels
17:30: Break and transfer to BOZAR
Panel discussion at BOZAR:
19:00–20:45: With Catherine David, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Marta Dziewańska
Introduced by Paul Dujardin, CEO and Artistic Director, BOZAR, Brussels; Moderated by Dirk Snauwaert and Nicola Setari, Head of Visual Arts, LUCA School of Arts, Brussels
Friday 02.06.2017
14:00–17:30 / WIELS Auditorium
19:00–20:45 / BOZAR Studio
Free entrance upon reservation
In English
This symposium is conceived by WIELS in the framework of The Absent Museum, and elaborated in conjunction with BOZAR and LUCA School of Arts.
Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.