Evening Keynote
“Where Theory Meets Practice, or, Every Museum Should Be a University Museum”
Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest
Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam/Leiden/Rotterdam & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Datum
Freitag, 27. September 2024, 18:30 Uhr
Ort
Technische Universität Dresden, Heinz-Schönfeld-Hörsaal im Barkhausen-BauGeorg-Schumann-Str. 13, 01069 Dresden
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Livestream per Zoom
https://tu-dresden.zoom-x.de/j/68193933334?pwd=qnniyvTBT0Tzq9c0HC4imhbbOjN0MN.1
Meeting ID: 681 9393 3334
Passcode: nrbM^60f
Abstract
This paper speculates on the university museum as the ideal museum, the space where theory meets practice, and specifically where practice is informed by theory. My thoughts are based on a long, ongoing dream of working in a university museum, one that, perhaps unrealistically, is not bound by the need to attract consistently high visitor numbers, nor is there the pressure for blockbuster programming, or to privilege entertainment over education. In this fictional museum, there is a commitment to critical discourse, to theory making, to research and education. Arguably, such a museum isn’t fictional at all. Indeed, across the world university museums abound, along different disciplinary orientations, whether art history, antiquities, anthropology, or history of science. Focused on the ethnographic/anthropology museum, I ask whether despite the important work that these museums have been doing, they may still adopt more radical practices of theory making.
In my presentation, I explore the connections between universities and museums through a discussion of two recent transdisciplinary academic projects that I have been involved with: “Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Collections in Museums”, and “Worlding Public Culture: The Arts and Social Innovation”. I will argue that what makes these projects special is that they were not conceived within the university for the museum, where the museum is invited in at the last minute for impact or proof of theory. Rather, the questions themselves emerged from the museum – what I would like to describe as museum-centered theory making. Here, the museum is not simply the object of study, as is more common, but is the site from which study is being done as the site for theory making. While these projects included a range of university and non-university partners, my ultimate argument is that they enacted a utopian university museum that could inspire other museums: theorizing socio-material relations and their politics from and through collecting and curatorial practice.
About Wayne Modest
Wayne Modest is Director of Content of Wereldmuseum, with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.