Until recently, Luis Camnitzer has been an insider’s tip in the field of conceptual art. This solo exhibition features some seventy works created since 1966, offering visitors a close look at the Uruguayan artist who may be considered one of the art world’s key figures in the second half of the 20th century.

In this installation on the main floor of Koerner Library, artist Luis Camnitzer explores the organization of knowledge and how people imagine and make connections between ideas. “Titles” written on torn pieces of paper have been randomly paired with objects found on the university campus. The pairings provoke viewers to make their own connections between text and object, thereby creating unique and unpredictable understandings of the work. Ideas about the way art and education (pedagogy) function are expanded by presenting a semi-chaotic situation that is meant to inspire a rethinking of how we order the world around us.

Traditionally, the museum as an institution has been devoted to a stable public. Conceived in order to exhibit the collections of individual donors and nation states to a sympathetic and stationary audience, the space of the museum was hermetic by design. Recent shifts in the international socio-economic landscape, however, have brought the very category of the “public” into question. As the speed and fluidity of economic, intellectual and political exchange increases powered by the motor of globalization, the stability of a singular public has given way to the proliferation of porous publics, calling for a reassessment of the status of the contemporary museum as such. The Future of the Contemporary, hosted by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, will contribute to this reassessment. Featuring lectures by a distinguished panel of critics, artists and curators from North America and South America, Europe, Africa and India, the symposium will ask what obligations the contemporary museum should address when confronted by the porous publics that populate the rich and often fraught space of the “global village.” Some past examples of representation of non western cultures in museums will be discussed. In addition to considering specific programming policies and exhibition strategies, the symposium will (re)conceptualize the museum more broadly. Speakers will ask how the waning of the permanent collection as a curatorial resource, the rise of online cataloguing, and the proliferation of satellite galleries, trans-national institutional partnerships and off-site exhibiting have influenced the cultural presence of the art museum as such. Symptoms of globalization, these developments in museological infrastructure have been seen by many as offering new opportunities to more accurately reflect the diverse and rapidly changing climate in which the contemporary museum is located. Others have regarded these developments as evidence of a willing complicity in commodity exchange and a concession of the contemporary museum’s critical distance. Practices of canon formation, curation and archiving will be discussed as possible components of an expanded 21st-century museology which might engage with and intervene in processes of globalization while maintaining the museum’s status as what Michel Foucault called a “heterotopia”, a space distinct from and unlike its object of analysis from which we can ask these questions.