CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings November 2–4, Stockholm, Sweden 1 CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings Day 1 1 Day 3 63 Friday, November 2, Moderna Museet Sunday, November 4, Kulturhuset Global Realities — Challenges for Modern Ethics of Museums in an Age of Mixed and Contemporary Museums Economy Keynote 1 4 Keynote 4 64 Daniel Birnbaum, Director and Jörg Heiser, Prof. Dr., Ann-Sofi Noring, Co-Director, University for the Arts, Moderna Museet, Berlin, Germany Stockholm, Sweden Perspective 6 72 Keynote 2 15 Ahmet Öğüt, Artist, Victoria Noorthoorn, Director, Amsterdam, Netherlands Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Perspective 7 75 Ann Gallagher, Director of Collections, Perspective 1 21 British Art, Tate, Katya García-Antón, Director, London, United Kingdom Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway Perspective 8 82 Mami Kataoka, Deputy Director Perspective 2 34 and Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum, Loulou Cherinet, Artist, Professor, Tokyo, Japan Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Speakers’ Biographies 87 Stockholm, Sweden Workshop conclusions 90 Day 2 36 Colophon 94 Saturday, November 3, Bonniers Konsthall The Future Intelligence of Museums Keynote 3 37 Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA Perspective 3 43 Lars Bang Larsen, Guest Professor, Royal Institute of Art and Adjunct Curator, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden / Copenhagen, Denmark Perspective 4 48 Ho Tzu Nyen, Artist, Singapore Perspective 5 59 Yuk Hui, Philosopher, Writer, Berlin, Germany Note: Click on any of the items above to jump to the corresponding page. Throughout the document, click on any of the page numbers to return to the table of contents. CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings Day 1 Friday, November 2 Moderna Museet Global Realities — Challenges for Modern and Contemporary Museums 3 CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings Keynote 1 Daniel Birnbaum and Ann-Sofi Noring Director and Co-Director Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden An Open Museum in a Larger World This is an extract from the book A Plurality of Tongues. couple of the main themes from the book and to Giving Direction to the Museum (Moderna Museet, illustrate the text with some of the images shown 2018). When giving the keynote lecture to open the at the conference: CIMAM Conference 2018, we made a summary of some of the thematic threads that run through the The collection as a laboratory programs of Moderna Museet. These include atten- tiveness to diversities and to alternative modernisms A large art collection is a perfect hotbed for visual as well as to the great contributions of women artists. and intellectual experiments. In recent years, Moderna Another interest concerns the interplay between art Museet has repeatedly challenged the standard forms: music, film, dance, poetry, design, architec- narrative of modernism through a number of radical ture, and all the disciplines we subsume under the art installations. It all began with Another Story, notion of visual art. A further leitmotif is the specula- for which we let photographic images gradually take tive power of the exhibition as a format and its over all the exhibition rooms. Our collection of capacity to activate the past. The primary focus photography, from 1840 to today, is one of the finest of our activities is not only the work of art, but the in Europe. Practically all the great names in photo- artists themselves. graphic history are represented — from Henri Cartier- Bresson, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Man Ray to For the conference we made our keynote in a dialogue Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall. form, which cannot easily be transformed to a written Our intention was to present the museum from a text. Therefore, we have chosen to reproduce a different angle and to make room for a story that Image 1: freq_out 8, 2012, organized by Carl Michael von Hausswolff: Image 2: Elaine Sturtevant in front of Andy Warhol’s Ten-Foot Flowers (1967) forty-eight hours of sound in 4,250 cubic meters of the museum. during her exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image, 2012. Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet 4 CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings provides a new perspective and enriches our under- standing of the development of art. Many of our visitors were interested in seeing more of our enormous collection of photography. Another Story was not only the largest-ever photographic exhibition at a Swedish museum but also incomparably the most popular. The photography exhibition was followed by a similar presentation of moving images that featured key works in the museum’s collection of films and videos, from Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, and Andy Warhol to video pioneers such as Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, and Pipilotti Rist. At the hub of this activity was a major retrospective of works by Eija-Liisa Image 3: Yoko Ono performing during the opening of Grapefruit, 2012. Ahtila, one of the most important artists exploring Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet the boundary between art and film today. Before and After Cinema was a collaboration with the Section for Cinema Studies at Stockholm University and Bonniers Konsthall, which involved us in an examina- tion of what the moving image can be and where it is heading in our new media world. An art museum usually displays objects for people to look at. The focus is on the eye. For forty- eight hours, we turned Moderna Museet into a museum of the ear, with a presentation consisting entirely of audio art and concerts: freq_out consisted of twelve individual audio works, each using a specific audio frequency, that together formed a soundscape. Image 4: The first installment of Hilma af Klint: Abstract Pioneer, 2013. Carl Michael von Hausswolff initiated freq_out and Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet describes the project as follows: “Sound has been a constant part of contemporary visual art for the past either be a museum or modern, but you can’t be both. century. The audio installation freq_out … is possibly Let us try to prove her wrong and uphold the paradox the largest complex audio work ever to have been of being a modern museum. installed in an art museum — forty-eight hours in 4,250 cubic meters. Twelve smaller works in different Shifting the story of modernism frequency areas have been combined into one totality. The sounds have neither beginning nor end but are in At Moderna Museet, we strive constantly to enrich constant flow and act in a sculptural way.” and shift the narrative of modernism by highlighting During a few baffling months, Sturtevant artists who have been partially overlooked. Many of presented her replicas of famous works by Joseph these artists are women. The fact that we have Beuys, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and other featured slightly more women than men in solo exhibi- male giants linked to the history of Moderna Museet. tions over the past few years thus not only manifests Following these fairly extreme transformations of the our ambition to redress this imbalance, but also museum’s exhibition halls, we have gradually installed expresses our desire to present alternative narratives a new chronological version of our collection that of how art has developed. By presenting a painter like covers all disciplines and seeks to generate new Jutta Koether instead of, say, Martin Kippenberger, dialogues between Swedish and international art. we gained a new perspective on German painting. Moderna Museet has a collection of international Not necessarily a truer perspective, but one that has standing, but our way of working with it will remain not been repeated insistently by museums around the experimental. In this way, we hope to combine weight world. The major exhibition of Eva Löfdahl was, first, with lightness. Small art galleries and biennials are a presentation of a great Swedish oeuvre, but by expected to take an experimental approach, but a complementing the exhibition with a rich program large museum with the ambition to remain open-minded of literature, dance, music, and philosophy, her art and vibrant must also continue to be a laboratory. served as a prism through which we could look back Gertrude Stein is reputed to have said that you can at the generation that emerged in the 1980s. 5 CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference Proceedings The concept of certain artists serving as prisms that Bridging artistic disciplines can reveal the artistic and political ambitions of an era has accompanied all our endeavors. By choosing Yoko Film, design, music, literature, architecture, painting, Ono, one of few women artists in the Fluxus movement, sculpture, photography … at Moderna Museet, you gain a specific insight not only into this particular we bridge the arts. It is often more exciting to visualize group but also into an entire generation. Ono is, the dialogue between visual art and other disciplines of course, an important artist in her own right, and than to see visual art as an isolated phenomenon. that goes for the other women artists featured in the Yes, it is often essential to make comparisons with museum’s solo exhibitions since 2010: Marina film, literature, and philosophy in order to understand Abramović, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Yael Bartana, Loulou the visual art of a period. This is obvious with, Cherinet, Moki Cherry, Keren Cytter, Siri Derkert, for example, Surrealism. It becomes apparent again Nathalie Djurberg, Cecilia Edefalk, Marie-Louise in Pop art and postmodernism. Things are interlinked. Ekman, Annika Eriksson, Isa Genzken, Sofia Hultén, Sometimes, a painting opens up a whole universe yet Jacqueline de Jong, Mary Kelly, Klara Lidén, Lee remains one facet of a larger cultural context. Lozano, Alice Neel, Lygia Pape, Hannah Ryggen, Niki This is an established tradition at our museum, de Saint Phalle, Doris Salcedo, Elaine Sturtevant, Astrid and in recent years we have initiated several exhibitions Svangren, Tora Vega Holmström, and many others.