International Conference: Collection as a Verb, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
8 December 2022, 10 a. m. – 5 p. m.
The international conference Collection as a Verb addresses the question of how to present works from (museum) collections in a way that would create a narrative connecting social experiences from the past with the needs of society today. In the debates, the participants will attempt to think beyond the prevalent concept of permanent exhibitions of museum collections, which presupposes the canon of the progress of art. Every canon puts itself forward as universal, permanent, valid for and applicable to all places and times. The word verb, on the other hand, implies a doer, an individual, a collective, or a group, thus excluding – at least in our context – universal generalizations. Following such a proposition, a collection exhibition should be porous, providing space for current and particular social issues, and not permanent but of necessity open to change. We are also witnessing the transformation of the historical paradigm of the museum as a repository of art into an institution actively engaged in building its sociopolitical context. This begs the question of how all these processes have affected the role of a museum curator. One of the central questions addressed at the conference will be how to stage an exhibition of works from a museum collection without imposing one’s expert knowledge, that is, how to think about expertise and professional museum ethics at the intersections created by the historical development of museums and art and the different voices of contemporary society.
Bojana Piškur from Moderna galerija will deliver a paper entitled “Southern Constellations: How to Continue, What is to Be Done, and Some Other Dilemmas,” presenting some of the ideas related to her decade-long research into the Non-Aligned Movement, especially its cultural politics, and the series of exhibitions of the same title that have been shown since 2019 in Ljubljana, Gwangju, Rijeka, Podgorica, Ramallah, and Skopje.
Link to their webpage.
Participants: Anonymous, Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum, Belgrade; Zdenka Badovinac, Director, MSU Zagreb; [BLOK], collective of curators, Zagreb; Charles Esche, Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Renata Filčić, curator, MSU Zagreb; Mira Gaćina, Director, Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Skopje; Jasna Jakšić, senior curator, head of the Archives and Information Department and of the Library, MSU Zagreb; Ana Janevski, curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bojana Piškur, senior curator, Moderna galerija plus Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; Agnieszka Tarasiuk-Sutryk, curator, head of the Collections and Archives Department, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw; Mabel Tapia, Deputy Artistic Director, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Leila Topić, senior curator, head of the Collections of Photography, Film, Video, and Media Art, MSU Zagreb; Natalija Vujošević, curator, Centar savremene umjetnosti Crne Gore, Podgorica.
