Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
Luis Camnitzer, Landscape as an Attitude, 1979. b/w photograph, 28.1 x 35.5 cm.
Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürch.
Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zürich.
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.
SCHEDULE
Thursday, September 29, 2:00 – 5:30 pm
2:00 pm
Scott Watson (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia)
Welcome & Introduction
2:15 – 4:00 pm
Luis Camnitzer (SUNY College at Old Westbury, New York)
Michelangelo’s Conundrum
Jaleh Mansoor (Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia)
The Future of the Contemporary, Or, What is Modernism? What was Modernity?
4:00 – 4:15 pm
COFFEE BREAK
4:15 – 5:30 pm
Katrin Steffen (Curator, Daros Latinamerica, Zürich and
Eugenio Valdes (Director of Art Education and Research, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro)
Daros Latinamerica: History and Future / a dialogue moderated by Antonio Eligio (Tonel), (Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia)
Friday, September 30, 9:30 am – 3:30 pm
9:30 am
Scott Watson (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia)
Introduction
9:45 am – 12:45 pm
Nicolas Bourriaud (Independent Curator; Head, Inspection of Artistic Creation, French Ministry of Culture, Paris)
Clementine Deliss (Director, Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt)
Remediating Collections in a Post-Ethnographic Museum
Nicolaus Schafhausen (Artistic and Managing Director, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam)
The Danger of Mediocrity
12:45 – 1:45 pm
LUNCH BREAK
1:45 – 3:30 pm
Saloni Mathur (Department of Art History, UCLA)
Modalities of the Mega-Museum in India
Maureen Murphy (Independent Curator)
Representing Contemporary African Art in Western Museums: Categories and Audiences
This symposium is held in conjunction with the exhibition Luis Camnitzer (September 30 – December 4, 2011; Opening Reception, September 29, 7 – 9pm).
Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
The Future of the Contemporary is co-organized and supported by the French Consulate of France in Vancouver and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. It is made possible with assistance from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ottawa, and the UBC Curatorial Lecture Series, supported by the Faculty of Arts and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.
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.
[more]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.
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