Weintz Art Lecture Series: Clémentine Deliss
The Department of Art & Art History's Weintz Art Lecture Series presents Clémentine Deliss, Global Humanities Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge.
The Collection Centric Museum-University of the Future
All museums are civic spaces that, together with universities and art colleges, perform an essential educational role. But how do we make their vast collections of historical artifacts active once more while the world is becoming increasingly virtual? Today, a renewed global engagement with archives takes the museum beyond its existing definition toward a more radical understanding of curatorial and educational urgency.
Working with collections established under the cultural politics of colonialism necessarily addresses the “stuff of the body” (Merleau-Ponty) out of which the world is made. So what do we do about efficiency, ecology, and sustainability, and how does that reflect not only in the way we curate, collect, and conserve, but equally in the use of the museum building and its infrastructure? Can we go so far as to re-organize the exhibition rooms of a museum with mobile workspaces for researchers and students? Can we bring collections into the venue’s central space, filling it with artifacts, archives, documents and miscellanea, producing contingent exhibitions for research? Here the museum-university provides everything necessary for hours of study with tables, chairs, technology, mobile vitrines, and of course, students.
In this lecture, Clémentine Deliss will speak about ways of recasting museums for multidisciplinary, performative, decolonial, and democratic models of research, art practice, and education. Case studies will include her redesign of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and current developments of the Metabolic Museum-University at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin.
Dr. Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, independent publishing, and critical anthropology. She studied art and anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London, and received her PhD from the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. She is currently Associate Curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, where she is developing the Metabolic Museum-University. Her recent book The Metabolic Museum was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin and has recently come out in Russian translation published by Garage Museum, Moscow.
This lecture series is made possible by a generous grant from Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz.
Photo by David Galstyan.
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This lecture will take place online via Zoom. Please register in advance (your name and email address are required). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing a link to join the Zoom meeting.
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