Mudam Luxembourg présente A Model: Reimagining Museums, un programme public imaginatif afin de repenser le musée au XXIe siècle.

Dans le cadre de A Model, une exposition qui propose une réflexion sur le rôle du musée en ce début du XXIe siècle, le Mudam organise le symposium Reimagining Museums. Les 8 et 9 juin 2024, le musée ouvre ses portes pour des tables rondes, des ateliers et des moments de convivialité, invitant publics, artistes et professionnel·le·s des institutions à engager un débat collectif sur l’idée même du musée et sur la façon dont il peut ou doit évoluer à l’avenir.

PROGRAMME
Saturday, 8 June

11:00 – 12:30
Introduction
With Bettina Steinbrügge (director of Mudam Luxembourg), Benjamin Weil (director of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian), Agustín Pérez Rubio (curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale)

14:00 – 15:30
Panel 1
Museums as laboratories
With Clémentine Deliss (curator and cultural historian, author of Skin in the Game), Chloé Quenum (artist and participant of the Benin Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale) and Hendrik Folkerts (curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions at Moderna Museet)
This panel will explore the diverse forms and functions of museums in today’s society. From serving as bastions of critical thinking to dynamic content producers, museums play a multifaceted role in shaping our understanding of the world. How are these institutions evolving beyond mere repositories of collections, and become educational tools and dynamic social spaces, fostering dialogue, empathy, and social engagement? How do museums engage with their communities, challenge perspectives, offer knowledge and address pressing social issues in their programming? And how do artists contribute to these changes?

15:45 – 17:15
Panel 2
Museums in times of shifting narratives
With Fatoş Üstek (curator and author of The Art Institution of Tomorrow), Kasia Redzisz (artistic director of KANAL – Centre Pompidou) and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (Arts and Culture programme manager at the Cité internationale des arts)
What narratives are woven within museum walls? From historical reinterpretations to contemporary reckonings, contemporary museums try to diversify their voices and perspectives and challenge conventional narratives. What new narratives are at play? In a world in constant flux and evolving perspectives, museums serve as dynamic storytellers, decentralising the gaze and inviting us to discover new ways of seeing.

18:00 – 19:00 Performance banquet with Luiza Prado
19:00 – 20:00 Live performance by Ebrima Mass
20:00 – 22:00 DJ set by Amuleto Manuela

PROGRAMME
Sunday, 9 June

11:00 – 12:00
Mudam in the Hot Seat!
Moderated by Jeff Schinker
Join Mudam’s director and her team for an open mic session at Oscar Murillo’s arena. Bring your topics of interest, ask any question, share your ideas and participate in redefining the museum experience.

14:00 – 15:30
Panel 3
Museums as ecosystems
With Giulia Bellinetti (Head of the Nature Research and Future Materials programme at the Jan van Eyck Academie), Guillaume Désanges (president of the Palais de Tokyo and author of Petit Traité de permaculture institutionnelle) and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (director of RADIUS)
As ecosystems thrive on interdependence and diversity, museums too are deeply entwined with their surrounding communities, territories and socio-political contexts. In this panel we explore the symbiotic relationship between museums and their ecosystems, examining how they adapt to and shape the cultural, economic and environmental landscapes around them.

15:45 – 16:15
Reading
The Imaginary Museum
By Ben Eastham
Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and writer of the acclaimed The Imaginary Museum: A Personal Tour of Contemporary Art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements. Introducing his latest book, the author does not expect us to like the artworks in his imaginary museum but offers tools to formulate and express our opinion. He argues: ‘In talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.’

Additionally, Reimagining Museums will host Drop In! Workshops (Mudam Mindmap and Map Your Museum, daily from 10:00 – 18:00), workshops by Petra-Petra (Saturday, 11:00 – 12:30 and Sunday, 14:30 – 16:00) and a series of unique guided tours !

Guided Tours Schedule:

• Saturday, 8 June
  13:00 – 14:00 Guided tour in English
  14:00 – 15:00 Mudam speaks: Italian, Luganda and Portuguese
  15:00 – 16:00 Guided tour in Luxembourgish
  16:00 – 17:00 Guided tour in French
  17:30 – 18:00 Alternative tour by the Ligue d’Improvisation Luxembourgeoise
  
  
• Sunday, 9 June
  13:00 – 14:00 Curator tour in English with Bettina Steinbrügge
  14:00 – 15:00 Mudam speaks: Arabic, Dutch and Spanish
  15:00 – 16:00 Guided tour in German
  16:00 – 17:00 Guided tour in English

A Model: Reimagining Museums is organised by:
António Mendes, head of publics department of Mudam Luxembourg and Bettina Steinbrügge, director of Mudam Luxembourg

Benjamin Weil joined Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in 2021 to assume the position of director of CAM (Centro de Arte Moderna). Born in Paris, Weil studied art history and attended the Curatorial Training Programme of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (1987), as well as the Whitney Independent Study Programme (graduating in 1989). He worked for a major private art collection in New York (1985–9), was director of the New Media Department at ICA London (1998–2000), curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA (2000–6), executive director of Artists Space in New York (2006–9), artistic director at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (2009–13) and artistic director of Centro Botín (2014–20). Weil also worked as an independent curator and art critic, publishing regularly in specialised papers, including Flash Art International(1992–5). In 1995, he co-founded Ada Web, the first digital studio dedicated to the production of art projects online, and was its artistic director until 1997. Aside from lecturing on contemporary art and participating in numerous juries – including the Prince of Asturias Awards (2012, 2013) – Weil has conceptualised and directed H BOX, a video art commissioning and peripatetic exhibition project for Fondation d’entreprise Hermès (2005–11); and also curated Untitled (Orchestral), a site-specific installation by João Onofre at MAAT (Lisbon, 2017), among others.

Agustín Pérez Rubio (b. 1972, Valencia) is a historian, professor and curator with extensive curatorial experience: he has curated nearly 200 exhibitions in museums and institutions in Latin America and Europe. He was artistic director of MALBA (Buenos Aires, 2013–18) and chief curator and director of MUSAC (León, 2003–13). He was a member of the Istanbul Biennial Board (2017–22) and actively continues his work on the CIMAM Board (2016–present). He has been part of curatorial committees of museum collections such as the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Tate, London; MALBA, Buenos Aires; FRAC Piemonte, Turin; MALI, Lima and MUSAC, León, among others. He is the curator of Migrant Art Gallery hosted by the Spanish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). He was previously the curator of Altered Views for the Chilean Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); he was also curator of the 11th Berlin Biennial (2018–20). He has been distinguished as a visiting professor at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext (Universität der Künste Berlin, 2019–20) and at other international universities and study centres. This year he is the guest curator for a new institution: Plataforma in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the same time, he is working on solo exhibitions of various artists for European museums and institutions.

Clémentine Deliss (b. 1960, London) works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, critical anthropology and publishing. She is curator-at-large at KANAL – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, where she is expanding her Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U) in relation to collections in Brussels. She holds an honorary Global Humanities Professorship in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Between 2020 and 2023, she was associate curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Her exhibition at KW Institute, Skin in the Game (2023), included seminal prototypes by artists Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Andrea Zittel. Between 2010–15, she was director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, where she instituted a new trans-disciplinary laboratory to remediate collections within a post-ethnological paradigm, working with a wide range of artists, lawyers and writers including Otobong Nkanga, Luke Willis Thompson, Antje Majewski, Thomas Bayrle, Tom McCarthy and El Hadji Sy. Her book, The Metabolic Museum (2020) was published in English by Hatje Cantz/KW, followed by translations into Russian (2021, Garage Museum) and Spanish (2023, Caniche Editorial, Madrid). Her recent book Skin in the Game: Conversations on Risk and Contention was published in December 2023 by Hatje Cantz/KW. She lives in Berlin.

Chloé Quenum (b. 1983, France) is an artist. She graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2011. She took up a residency at the Manufacture de la Cristallerie Saint-Louis in 2019 as part of the Hermès Foundation programme. A winner of the Mondes Nouveaux programme supported by the French Ministry of Culture, she presented the installation Épopée at the Hôtel de Ragueneau, Bordeaux in 2023. Since 2012, her work has been the subject of regular solo exhibitions, most recently Wonder Wander at Florence Loewy, Paris (2023) and Overseas at Les Bains-Douches, Alençon (2020). Quenum is representing Benin at the 60th Venice Biennale alongside artists Ishola Akpo, Moufouli Bello and Romuald Hazoumè, curated by Azu Nwagbogu.

Hendrik Folkerts is curator of International Contemporary Art and head of exhibitions at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. At Moderna Museet, he has recently curated the exhibitions Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (2024) and Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and the Moderna Museet collection (2023–4). He organised solo exhibitions and projects with Every Ocean Hughes and Sara Sejin Chang in 2022. Folkerts previously was Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017–22); curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014–17); curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programming at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010–15); and coordinator of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2009–11). He has authored and edited various publications and catalogues, including Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (2024), Alexandra Bachzetsis: SHOW/TIME/BOOK BOOK/TIME/SHOW (2023), Thinking-in-action: A Conversation between Rashid Johnson and Kevin Quashie (2023), Katalin Ladik: O-oooooooopus (2023), Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines (2022), Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (with Laura Barlow, 2019), and The Place of Performance (Stedelijk Studies edition, 2015).

Fatoş Üstek (b. 1980, Ankara) is an independent curator and writer. She is the author of The Art Institution of Tomorrow, Reinventing the Model (2024), co-founder and managing director of the non-profit community interest company FRANK Fair Artist Pay, curator of Frieze Sculpture in London, and curator of Cascading Principles: Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy and Interference at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford University. Alongside leading international projects, she holds governance roles in arts organisations: in the UK (chair, New Contemporaries), the Netherlands (editorial advisory, Extra Magazine), and Germany (advisory board, Urbane Künste Ruhr). Üstek is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) UK, Independent Curators International, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) and is a founding member of the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA).
She was previously director of the Liverpool Biennial, director of the Roberts Institute of Art, curator of Art Night, London (2017), curator of fig-2 – 50 projects in 50 weeks, ICA London (2015) and associate curator of the tenth Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2014).
Üstek has commissioned a number of public projects in the UK and Turkey, and has also taken on multiple jury roles, including for the Turner Prize 2020; the Scottish Pavilion 2022 and the Dutch Pavilion in 2022 and 2024 at the Venice Biennale; and the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2022–4). She is often a member of the nominating committees for prestigious prizes such as the Jarman Award and the Fourth Plinth.

Kasia Redzisz is artistic director at KANAL – Centre Pompidou in Brussels. Prior to joining KANAL she served as senior curator at Tate Liverpool, where she was responsible for the programme and international collaborations. Between 2008 and 2015 she worked as a curator at Tate Modern, while also serving as director of Fundacja Open Art Projects, a Warsaw organisation dedicated to innovative art commissions. Her independent work includes many interdisciplinary projects, most recently the inaugural exhibition of Muzeum Susch (2019) and the fourth edition of the Art Encounters Biennial (2021). She is an author of books, editor of exhibition catalogues and contributor to magazines such as Frieze, Mousse and Tate Etc. Redzisz’s curatorial practice reflects her commitment to equality, experimentation and to establishing transnational dialogues between artistic practices stemming from diverse geographies.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (b. 1976, Ljubljana) is an interdependent curator, editor and writer. She curated the exhibitions Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton (2019, Mechelen); Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s–1980s) at LaM, Lille and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2019–20); Show me your archive and I will tell you who is in power at KIOSK, Ghent (2017);Let’s Talk about the Weather at the Sursock Museum, Beirut and Times Museum, Guangzhou (2016 and 2018); and Resilience: U3 – Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia at MSUM, Ljubljana (2013). She was co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2010–12) and chief editor of the Manifesta Journal (2012–14) and of L’Internationale Online (2014–17). She is chief editor of Versopolis Review, and curated the project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, organised by KADIST, Paris (2017–21). She has organised symposiums at the INHA, Paris; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana. She is the co-organiser of the seminar Something You Should Know (2016–ongoing, EHESS, Paris). Since 2019, she has been working as a tutor at the Sint Lucas School of Arts, Antwerp and is co-founder of the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care.

Giulia Bellinetti is a researcher and cultural programmer. Her interests lie in the political ecologies of contemporary art institutions and, more specifically, in the transformations occurring in their epistemic cultures in the age of ecological emergency. This subject is the focus of Bellinetti’s doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam. Her theoretical investigation interweaves with her institutional positioning at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where Bellinetti is head of the Nature Research Department and Future Materials programme. Bellinetti has given lectures and collaborated with a wide range of institutions, including MMCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Goldsmiths University, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano; E-WERK, Luckenwalde; and Temporary Gallery, Cologne. Previously, Bellinetti was head of the Production Department at M HKA, Antwerp.

Guillaume Désanges is a curator and art critic. In January 2022 he was named president of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has worked at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, founded the independent production structure Work Method, and was guest curator at the art centre Le Plateau – Frac Île-de-France. He has organised numerous exhibitions in major French and international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Generali Foundation in Vienna and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. He was also responsible for the artistic programme of La Verrière – Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in Brussels from 2013 to 2022 before taking over the artistic direction of the Salon de Montrouge in 2022. He has taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris-Cergy and Lyon, as well as the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is director and curator at RADIUS, the Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology in Delft, which he founded in 2021. Previously, he was director of the art space A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam from 2019 to 2021, artistic director of Brussels-based platform POPPOSITIONS between 2016 and 2019, and a curatorial fellow at TENT in Rotterdam from 2015 to 2016. In 2012, he founded The Office for Curating. Central to Lekkerkerk’s work as a curator and writer are socio-political, theoretical and philosophical discourses revolving around climate and systemic change, environmental and ecosystems thought, and social and climate justice. More specifically, he focuses on debates concerning the Anthropocene, modernism and natural sciences, regenerative ecologies, post-humanism and the increasing entanglement between nature and culture, approached through the lenses of intersectional ecology and the philosophy of science. His publications include The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar (Onomatopee, 2018), Bestiary of Corona Animals (Onomatopee, 2020) and Worlding Ecologies: Art, Science and Activism Towards Climate Justice (Valiz, forthcoming in 2024). In 2012, he received the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award and in 2014 he was the beneficiary of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.

Jeff Schinker (1985) is a novelist, journalist and comparative literature scholar from Luxembourg. He has published Retrouvailles (2015), Sabotage (2018), a book in four languages mimicking his home country’s Babel-like multilingual situation as well as Ma vie sous les tentes (2021), a dystopian autofiction focussing on music festivals. He worked as a freelance journalist until 2017, when he took over as head of the cultural pages of Tageblatt, Luxembourg’s second daily newspaper. There, he’s mainly known for writing on film, literature, theatre, music and cultural politics, with an accent on zany avant-garde and absurd fictions, be they literary, cinematographic or theatrical. Music-wise, he’s into post-rock, post-metal, electro and indie rock. In 2022, he was granted a Kultur | lx-scholarship and will be 2023’s Luxembourg writer in residence at the prestigious Berlin-based Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. Schinker’s play PatrIdiot, about structural racism in Luxembourg, premiered in October 2023 at Kasemattentheater. Since January 2024, he’s coordinating the cultural shows at Luxembourg’s public service radio station radio 100,7.

Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and co-founder of The White Review. His second book, The Imaginary Museum, was published in September 2020. He is the editor of books including The White Review Anthology (Fitzcarraldo, 2017), Before or After, at the Same Time (Hauser & Wirth, 2019) and Luis Camnitzer: One Number Is Worth One Word (Sternberg/e-flux, 2020). He was publications editor and a co-curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennial, entitled Cosmos Cinema. His writing has been published in e-flux, ArtReview, Frieze, London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Fantastic Man, Acne Paper and the Financial Times, among other publications. He has written monographic essays for artists including Ed Ruscha, Camille Henrot, Kati Heck and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. He was previously editor at ArtReview and associate editor at documenta 14. He holds a first-class degree from Trinity College, Dublin, where he was elected a scholar and awarded the John Henry Bernard Prize in Philosophy.

Luiza Prado De O. Martins (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro) is an artist, activist and researcher. Her work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a means of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of care. She holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin, and an MA from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Her ongoing artistic research project, Un/Earthings and Moon Landings narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; and Kampnagel, Hamburg, among others. She is currently based in Berlin.

Sara Fonseca da Graça | Petra.Preta (b. 1992, Almada) is a transdisciplinary artist, with a degree in Theatre Acting from ESTC, Amadora. Through the fusion of artistic practices, she navigates liminal spaces between fiction and biography, seeking to map healing processes. With work composed of illustrations, paintings and texts that give rise to books, which become installations and then transform into performances, the disciplinary intersection serves as a reflection of the intersectionalities that cross her experience, as well as being a vehicle to transform languages and create safe imaginaries.