Museum as Commons

Watch the lecture and conversation with Jarosław Suchan, Director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, HERE

One of Keynote speakers at ARCHIVES OF/FOR THE FUTURE, together with Krzysztof Wodiczko, Oliver Grau, Giovanna Fossati at the Annual Conference of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) held the University of Łódź, Poland.

I discussed the 2009 Tender Museum project for Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Mediation and negotiation are at the centre of this project, addressing agency of the artist inside an institutional structure. How does the museum empower an artist and how does the artist negotiate a space for herself in the existing narratives of the museum and its history? Additionally, how does inverting the roles of artist and curator contribute to reading of the mechanisms of power?

Constructing a dialogue between myself and the historically marginalized figure of the female curator, Urszula Czartoryska, led to a fictional encounter and provided me with an important generational link. Acting as an artist I was under no obligation to reproduce already existing power relations, so I decided to complicate the reading by introducing affect, as a more contentious site in the perception of institutional history. The museum can be seen as a contemporary production site with the archive as its silent engine.