2022 Winter

Where does my body belong? From institutional critique to infrastructural transformation, OR, Museums, they breathe too

Workshop mit Ruth Buchanan
In Kooperation mit dem Museum für Franken




Cultural institutions play a key role within a civic society, offering an interface between cultural and intellectual work and the amorphous concept of “general public”. If Institutional Critique has been a rubric under which artists have acted to reorientate the standard practices of such institutions what has this brought the institution, the artists, or the “general public”? What role have and can museums of all scales play in this process, and how can a regional museum participate in this dynamic work? This workshop split over 3 sessions looks at what the future of this discourse is, and what it means in practice. How can we go form an internalising and self-reflected critique to developing infrastructures that set in motion an expansive civic-facing form of transformation? What tools do we need? What languages could we/should we use, interrogate, reform, or abandon completely? And crucially how can this process be one of embodied scrutiny that moves between individual practice as artists to the setting of precedents in the public sphere? Following a presentations by guest teacher Ruth Buchanan and group discussions on site on day one. On day two we will as a class participate in a movement workshop led by dancer and researcher Tanja Saban, this workshop is also open to all museum staff. On day three we will work together (in consensus) to develop a document that proposes a detailed glossary of terms that could form the basis of a policy to be used by artists, curators, mediators, archivists and researcher to move away from institutional critique to infrastructural transformation. And subsequently you’ll be invited to take this glossary and get it moving, to allow it set into a motion a work within your practice. This workshop will run in English / mixed with German

Text © Ruth Buchanan, 2022
Dokumentationsfotos © Katja Eydel, 2022