CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings The Roles and Responsibilities of Museums in Civil Society CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings Singapore 10–12 November 2017 1 CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings Day 1 3 Day 3 56 Friday 10 November Sunday 12 November National Gallery Singapore National Gallery Singapore Art And The City: From Local To Transnational? What Do Museums Collect, And How? Keynote 1 4 Keynote 3 57 Nikos Papastergiadis Donna De Salvo Director, Research Unit in Public Cultures, Deputy Director for International Initiatives and Professor, School of Culture and and Senior Curator, Whitney Museum of Communication, University of Melbourne, American Art, New York, USA Melbourne, Australia Perspective 7 69 Perspective 1 13 Adriano Pedrosa Ute Meta Bauer Artistic Director, São Paulo Museum of Art, Founding Director, NTU Centre for São Paulo, Brazil Contemporary Art Singapore, Singapore Perspective 8 75 Perspective 2 18 Tiffany Chung Chen Chieh-Jen Artist, Vietnam/USA Artist, Taiwan Perspective 9 81 Perspective 3 24 Suhanya Raffel Andrea Cusumano Executive Director, M+, Hong Kong Deputy Mayor for Culture of Palermo, Italy Speakers Biographies 86 Day 2 27 Colophon 90 Saturday 11 November National Gallery Singapore Re-Learning Southeast Asia Keynote 2 28 Patrick D. Flores Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines Perspective 4 40 Ade Darmawan Artist, Curator and Director, ruangrupa, Jakarta, Indonesia Perspective 5 45 Gridthiya Gaweewong Artistic Director, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand Perspective 6 50 Post-Museum Jennifer Teo & Woon Tien Wei Artists, Singapore 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 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings Day 1 Friday 10 Novemeber National Gallery Singapore Art and the City: From Local To Transnational? 3 CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings Keynote 1 Nikos Papastergiadis Director, Research Unit in Public Cultures, and Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne (Australia) Museums and their Spaces: From the City as Sanctuary to a Molecular Confederation This is a revised and expanded version of the author’s presentation at the CIMAM Annual Conference 2017. https://vimeo.com/249053192 Cities are formed out of the need for security, in the need to happen in the city in order, as Marx and pursuit of commerce, and through the expression Engels suggested, that it also rescues us from the of culture. The idea that the city, or at least a sacred “idiocy” of rural life? portion of it, is a place of sanctuary is equally ancient. Today cities are interpenetrated by a complex However, in general the city offers protection against array of global and local forces that are creating invaders, fosters industries for processing raw new divisions and hierarchies. The threats are not products, and through the evolution of rituals and necessarily found from rival neighbors, or even in the protocols it distinguishes itself from the ways of the internal difference between urban and rural demands. barbarians. The city is a place of foication, assembly, Over two decades ago, Saskia Sassen (1991) and deliberation. By allowing people, things, and commented that global cities like New York, London, ideas to come together in a concentrated manner, and Tokyo have more in common with each other than it stimulates exchange, translation, and innovation. with other cities in their immediate regions.1 As this If we are to uphold that these values are best served globalizing trajectory has intensified there are now in a concentrated form, and if the intensities afforded even more cities that are reconfiguring their priorities by urban life are maximized through a careful oscilla- as they are becoming decoupled from their states. tion between proximity and distance, then we need This may sound odd in Singapore, because the city to consider: who are the invaders and barbarians that is both state and region. But of course, the island threaten the contemporary city? Does the revolution polis of Singapore is both an outlier and in a way 1 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). 4 CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings a paradigmatic version of the global city. Everywhere The diasporas and networks have created alignments else the contradictions of globalization and urbaniza- which exceed the conventional structures and feelings tion are more pronounced. of belonging within the parameters of the nation state. Recently, the former mayor of New York City, The brutal changes were often glossed over by the Michael Bloomberg stated that Brexit was the most success stories that either celebrated the heroic stupid thing a nation has ever done, with the exception examples of migrants rising from rags to riches, or that of voting for Trump.2 It was not his former constitu- trumpeted the huge leaps forward in life chances. ents that supported Trump. The President’s personal Globalization drew on this modernist commitment tower is in New York, but his political base lies in that to a forward momentum and the transgression of territorial rump that is known as “fly over America”. borders. It was against closed markets, impatient with The turn to a populist right wing and neo-nationalist institutional procedures, and opposed to the inhibitors agenda, that was also evident in regions such as the of traditional cultural values. Globalization promised former East Germany and the deindustrialized pockets to mobilize vitality and innovation through willful of France, is now seen as the most pronounced threat disruption. Yet, how many have been enlivened, to global capital and urban civility in the West. These enriched and emancipated by this process? Has the interior regions are splitting further and further way nation withered away, or does it matter even more from the coastal mega cities and metropolises across than ever before. the world. A decade ago many of us expressed a Is this what the West has come down to: wide-eyed optimism about the possibilities of mobility a showdown between Trump and Clinton? City vs extending the forms of cultural exchange and Country? These are two wrong options. They are cross-cultural translation. As Craig Calhoun noted, not equally bad, just as Macron is not the same as “all the talk was about cosmopolitanization of Le Pen. However, the reduction of choices to these everyday life, cosmopolitan democracy, and the wrong options only confounds those who are right ever-greater advance of supra-national unity in to register that their lives are hollowed out by onto- Europe.”3 The new technologies in communication logical insecurity and environmental degradation. and significant decline in the cost of travel also Globalization has generated unprecedented levels fostered a kind of naïve cosmopolitanism: of mobility. Neo-liberalism did a stunning job in decoupling state power from economic control. So now that everyone is able to journey to In the name of freeing the market to deliver services, distant countries, to experience other cultures it transferred state-controlled assets into private and traverse geographical barriers; now that companies, and in the name of deregulation it obstacles in the form of political systems, commodified the infrastructure for public service, languages, cultures, differences between environmental care and social protection. However, countries and regions are disappearing, it failed to provide a suitable platform for the delibera- and perpetual transformation is perhaps the tion and redistribution of public goods, and it effec- one constant of our contemporary modernity, tively produced levels of inequality that the West has especially now that the foundations of national not seen since the 1910s and 1920s. In short, almost governance, in the sense of belonging to a all the gains in the welfare state, democratic account- nation-state, is becoming increasingly weaker. ability, and human rights have rolled back, and new Nationalism is regarded as a feeling that doesn’t environmental threats, xenophobic fears and illiberal fit the time, and people are starting to construct modes of governance have become indistinguishable a new identity based on the city where they from one another. live. This is what characterizes the world we The rhetoric of globalization was stitched into live in and artists are undoubtedly one of the the modern promise of mobility. Modernity was driven social classes that possess more freedom of by technical transformations and massive migrations. movement in this era.4 Movement underpinned the era of industrialization and increased the mixture of peoples and their cultures. 2 Graham Ruddick, “Michael Bloomberg: Brexit is Stupidest Thing Any Country Has Done Besides Trump”, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/24/ michael-bloomberg-brexit-is-stupidest-thing-any-country-has-done-besides-trump (accessed 10 May 2018). 3 Craig Calhoun, “Public Spectacle: Is There Anything Left after Global Spectacles and Local Events? Craig Calhoun in conversation with Peter Beilharz and Nikos Papastergiadis, 15 May 2017”, (Melbourne: RUPC pamphlets, 2017). 4 Barbara Vanderlinden, “‘Re-Used Modernity’ Brussels Biennial 1”, (Cologne: W. Konig Verlag, 2008), 34. 5 CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings In a relatively short time, such emphatic declarations it requires a hermetic, flat, homogenized world.