The Museum of Contemporary Art fo the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Anne Dressen: Out of the storage! Or how to think a museum for the plural arts?

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Dressen embarked on a PhD research at the Ecole normale Supérieure in Paris, in order to temporarily take some distance from her own curatorial practice, and to investigate further, both theoretically and practically, the notion of "plural arts" (encompassing the so-called fine arts and the decorative and folk arts, and including non-western arts, beyond the usual hierarchies or the problematic encyclopedic paradigm). Her belief is that the notion of plurality could be instrumental in thinking the possibility of an institution of a new kind, one that would be more inclusive and transversal but also increasingly self-reflexive. In this conference, Dressen will address how her research developed, and taking the title of the series "the future of the museum" in a very direct manner, she will reflect on why such a museum does not exist yet, and how it could actually happen. What could be its conceptual and political potential?

In her view, the museum storage space can serve as a stimulating new methodological model : in these saturated crypts - that one could consider as the subconscious left-overs’ basement of canonical art history -- various unclassifiable, misfits objects coexist in surreal arrangements that do not follow the usual classifications (i.e. by masterpieces, artistic schools, chronology, geography, or even mediums). She will share some thoughts about pioneer figures (thinkers, architects and artists) who helped reforming the museum normative conventions and will reflect on how scenography and mediation could be reinvented in more open,polyvocal and creative ways. 

Anne Dressen is a curator of contemporary art at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris where she curated several group exhibitions dealing with undervalued artistic mediums, such as textile and tapestries (Decorum), ceramics (The Flames), jewelry (Medusa), but also music video (Playback), or fakes, forgeries and copies (Seconde main). Through these research projects, she questioned and problematized through an anthropological lens their relationships with the more legitimate "fine" or "noble" arts.

Anne Dressen: Out of the storage! Or how to think a museum for the plural arts?
7 November, Tuesday, 6.30 pm
Free entrance