Focused Discussion
Museum Narration: A Memory-driven Storyscape
Focused Discussion Yaxi Liu
For a museum, both the building fabric and exhibitions embody much of its history, stories, and concerns. They form a storied layout inscribed on the walls and the floors, and in the meanwhile create an immersive and intuitive experience for audiences. Compared to the novel, drama, film, and computer game, the narratives in a museum are real, alive, and driven by collective memories, evolving with power. This paper takes spatial narratives as the approach to reflect the museum narration in China of the last sixty years when there has been dramatic and intensive culture changes. This brings up the question, how social media will impact museum narration in the future? How would the museum space be transformed by the visible or invisible online world? How would such new coded spaces affect the visitor’s perception?
Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin
Focused Discussion Victoria Bishop Kendzia
This focused discussion engages in critical discussions of the challenges to inclusion that arose during my empirical doctoral research with young Berlin-based visitors at the Jewish Museum Berlin. The work is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. The participants in this ethnographic study come from a variety of different backgrounds, ranging from upper-middle to lower class students of West German background, to those in similar catchment areas of East German background, to participants from an area of Berlin with a majority population of Turkish background. The work accompanies these students over time in the museum and in the classroom. It examines how they relate to the museum, the history it displays, and their own positioning in relation to the topic. Further, the participant observations are fundamentally interactive in nature. I introduce and discuss this material, not only relating visitor experience at this very popular museum, but also to reflecting and exchanging ideas on the broader implications of how memorialization and difference are managed more generally within the cultural and educational spheres in Germany and beyond. The up-close fieldwork shows how seemingly small acts of practice expose much broader issues of participation, the power to interpret, and belonging.
History and Visual Culture in Dialogue: Diverse Conversations with/in the Papered Walls of United States Southern Imagery
Focused Discussion Brenda Stevenson, Carla Jay Harris
A small room is wallpapered with a culturally and historically iconic pattern designed to connect distinctly chosen photographs, drawn images, and reclaimed prints of people, landscapes, and rituals of the American South during the half century (1900-1950) that preceded the revolutionary Civil Rights era. The room serves as a vehicle for filmed twenty-minute, cross-cultural conversations between seated voyeurs/witnesses of the southern apartheid experience as recreated in the papered walls. The designed wall paper inset with historic photographs encouragse the discourse to move on from the historic era to contemporary questions of race, location, and ownership of the U.S. national mantra of equality and democracy. There will be three filmed conversations of groups of ten persons each. These three groups are multiracial, multi-gender, and represent diverse class affiliations, but are defined by generation. Group One will include persons within the sixty-five to seventy-five age group. Group Two includes people between ages forty-five and fifty-five. Group Three will include people between ages twenty-five and thirty-five. The exhibit in Granada will include film cuts from these conversations along with a hosted focused discussion of both the art piece (wall paper and images) and the conversations it inspired across the generations represented in these groups.
Digitally Engaged Spectators in Pipilotti Rist's Work: Exploring Online Exhibition Spaces
Focused Discussion Betsy Willett
In 2016 the New Museum presented "Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest," a thirty-year retrospective of Rist’s work that spanned the entire three gallery floors of the museum. Rist’s work occupies multiple spaces, including one in the museum and one on Instagram. I investigate the idea of space and argue that modern and digitally-enabled spectators move about spaces – digital and gallery – differently than historic museum-goers. Rist’s work plays with the idea of putting people inside a screen inside a gallery, transforming the passive viewer into an activated spectator. When photographed by smartphone-enabled spectators, Rist’s work inspires a new generation of museum curators that create a new exhibition space online. The modern museum visitor is usually wielding a phone and capturing miniature versions of the art right there in the exhibition. By Rist’s permission, the visitor can choose to see the exhibition through the lens of their phone. Could this be a sort of intentional deeper digital engagement? The images taken in the exhibition live on Instagram under a hashtag or a geotag that lets the viewer know where the photo was taken. A geotag becomes a space online, the digital equivalent of the museum space. The modern smartphone-wielding patron impacts the exhibit, both in physical co-presence, and in the ways their Instagrammed images represent, translate, and re-imagine that exhibit in the digital space of social media. This investigation considers the possible implications of creating art that can function in both the digital and gallery spaces.
Music in the Making: Re-framing Museum Engagement Through Music and Musical Instrument Collections
Focused Discussion Tim Corum
If musical instruments are relational objects that provide a physical and emotional link between player and listener, what is the unique potential for museum collections of musical instruments to create new inclusive relationships and networks? The complexity of musical instruments as cultural objects is reflected in the diversity of activities generated by the musical instrument collection in London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens. Musical instruments by their nature offer enormous potential for engagement and this paper describes how developing this potential can reframe the relationship between the museum and its constituency. Building on the Horniman’s extensive past experience of collecting projects; the diversity of our partnerships and engagement work; our understanding of how music is explored through fieldwork, sound recordings, handling collections and live performances, I compare our approach to that of other major museums devoted to music. This review of will expose the challenges of engaging people with such a relational collection within the confines of the museum, as well as the potential some methods of interpretation and engagement have for co-creating a truly inclusive vision for museums. In response the Horniman has reached out to existing and new communities and practitioners, to collaboratively explore new understandings of the collection. The final section of the paper describes Music in the Making, the Horniman’s current strategic engagement programme, which involves a large and diverse constituency in reconsidering the musical instrument collections and co-developing new contexts of engagement, with lessons for the wider cultural sector.
The Listening Museum: Lessons from the Bahian Museum-schools of the Fifties and Sixties
Focused Discussion Felix Toro
How can a museum learn to listen? Starting from examples of actual learning experiences, the discussion focuses on the possibilities of different museums to generate pertinent knowledge to their particular contexts, and how institutions can reorganize themselves based on the responses of the public they engage. The foreground position of education in institutions that formed the Bahian modernism of the 1950's and 60's, such as Lina Bo Bardi's Museum-School, the Museum of the South Atlantic, and Anísio Teixeira's School-Park, are enthralling examples for contemporary museums to consider in bringing educational thinking to their core. Active discussion of participants' experiences in other museums and institutions, as well as in the conference itself, will be indispensable for the discussion.
