The Futures of the Museum programme

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the future of museums and their social responsibility with regards to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

This time the guest is Clémentine Deliss. Dr. Clémentine Deliss is Global Humanities Professor of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where she directs the Metabolic Museum-University. Her practice crosses the borders of contemporary art, curatorial experimentation, and critical anthropology. Between 2010–2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt instituting a new lab for post-ethnographic research. She was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study Berlin and has taught art theory and curatorial practice at the Ecole nationale supérieur Paris-Cergy, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and the Hamburg University of the Arts. Her book The Metabolic Museum was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production with KW (2020), and in Russian translation with Garage Publishing (2021).

Legal complexity, contention, ambiguity and speculation underlie the relationship between collections from the past, and their latent potential for future knowledge production. For the younger generation, for example, there can be no in-depth decolonial art history without access to ethnographic collections, and the elaboration of a legal language with which to re-distribute rights. In her lecture, Clémentine Deliss will speak about ways of designing museums for transversal, performative, decolonial, and democratic models of art practice, research, and education. Case studies will include her work with the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and subsequent developments of the Metabolic Museum-University in Kyiv, Karlsruhe, Ljubljana, and more recently at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin.

Thursday, May 12, 2022. 12 pm
Lecture. From Casino to Lazarett - Exercises for Remediating the Museum
Clémentine Deliss, Global Humanities Professor of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin
Auditorium of Artium Museum. Free entrance

Photography by Christian Werner

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