The research project ‘Whose Bildung? Renegotiating modern art museums through exhibition practices’ seeks to explore and discuss the role and possibilities of exhibition practices in a museum landscape, where understandings of the Western art museum as a public knowledge institution is rapidly changing.
In recent years, international public movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, decolonization actions and global climate protests has put the art museum as a public institution under increased scrutiny, a critical attention which calls for introspection. A concrete, recent example that the museal (self-)understanding is changing can for example be observed in the approval of a new museum definition at the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in August 2022, which departs from the previous definition in fundamental ways, stressing the importance of diversity, sustainability, and an ethically informed museum practice.
Through close readings of three recent art exhibitions in large-scale Scandinavian art institutions – Gauguin – Why Are You Angry? at the Glyptotek, Copenhagen (19.11.2020 - 01.08.2021), Kirchner and Nolde up for Discussion at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (21.4.2021- 1.8.2021) and Call Me By My Name at the Munch Museum, Oslo (2021), the project analyzes how these exhibitions self-critically grapple with the art museum’s historical, institutional models of knowledge; encompassed through the notion of Bildung. The project asks whether these exhibition practices might help us rethink the role of the art museum as a public knowledge institution today.
While several research projects have successfully evaluated, discussed and nuanced how critical exhibition strategies are enacted within smaller and medium-sized museum institutions, the question of how large-scale public art museums – whose exhibitions must necessarily address a much broader, varied and non-specialized art audience – can address the current paradigm shift within museums has not yet been discussed or explored in depth. This is what my research project sets out to do.
For further information please contact Pernille Lystlund Matzen at plm@louisiana.dk and/or +45 20886450
