Non-fiction

Last week we gave a series of workshops on three consecutive days during ‘Contemporary Art: Who Cares‘, an international symposium for (up-and-coming) professionals, from diverse disciplines, who are connected to the conservation of modern and contemporary art. Organised by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN), Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands (SBMK) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the symposium was very well attended with participants from all over the world.

In our workshop alone, there were people from such renowned institutions as ZKM in Germany, Kiasma in Finland, MoMA, Guggenheim and SFMOMA in the US, Tate in the UK and De Hallen and n8 in The Netherlands.

We talked about how contemporary art can be made accessible to the public and the role of conservators and conservation information in this process. We provided an overview of organisations (in and outside of cultural heritage) that are using new media and emerging technologies to engage with audiences. The second half of the session was dedicated to a short and practical exercise focusing on how new media strategies can be deployed in the domain of contemporary arts conservation. We experimented with the online presence of art works through social media, based on the fictional example of AnnLee (a virtual character taken from a bigger art installation, currently owned by the Van Abbemuseum) and her Facebook profile.

In addition, each day we had a guest speaker who discussed how their museum has attempted to educate the public on issues of conservation of contemporary art. On the first day we welcomed Ton Quik, curator education and events at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, who talked about a recent multi-media tour on the collection from 2008, taking a documentary of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing as an example. Maartje Swinkels, owner of Akina Art Projects, joined us the second day and discussed how relatively small museums use museum PDA- and smartphone-tours to educate, amuse and let their visitors participate. On the final day our guest was Lúcia Matos, from Faculdade de Belas Artes of Universidade do Porto, who proposed to consider the temporary exhibition as an opportunity to reinvent new strategies for contemporary art survival.

Our presentation and a review of the various sessions and contributions will be available online soon.

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